Species Interactions Quotes

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

Why is it not just as likely that there were as many small general nearly at first as now, and as great a disproportion in the number of their species?

Fossils have richer stories to tell - about the lub-dub of dinosaur life - than we have been willing to listen to.

What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.

The fewer species there are and the fewer species we know about, the fewer questions we even know to ask.

Islands are known to differ in the food supply available to ground finches, mainly seeds.

Ecological differentiation is the necessary condition for coexistence.

Becoming a bird ecologist was just luck! I had the chance to be a field assistant for a scientist working in the Galapagos Islands, and while I was there, I saw a particular problem in behavioral biology that I wanted to solve and, in the process, made myself into a bird ecologist.

A species is a reproductive community of populations reproductively isolated from others that occupies a specific niche in nature.

A study of animal communities has this advantage: they are merely what they are, for anyone to see who will and can look clearly; they cannot complicate the picture by worded idealisms, by saying one thing and being another; here the struggle is unmasked and the beauty is unmasked.

My roots, in college, were in behavior in the context of evolution.

I would love to be a field biologist. I would love to do what Jane Goodall did, just totally immerse myself in the life of one specific species for years and study every aspect of its behavior until little by little, all of these patterns become clear. That would be great, but I don't know if I have it left in me.

The world of organisms, of animals and plants, is built up of individuals. I like to think, then, of natural history as the study of life at the level of the individual-of what plants and animals do, how they react to each other and their environment, how they are organized into larger groupings like populations and communities.

I also assume that they are not simply the physical properties of things as now conceived by physical science. Instead, they are ecological, in the sense that they are properties of the environment relative to an animal.

There are a number of attributes of species and populations that are not of any particular selective advantage to any single individual in a population but that are of great advantage to the population as a whole.