Species Richness 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.

It's fair to say when you go out and walk in the woods or on a beach, the most conspicuous forms of life you will see are plants and animals, and certainly there's a huge diversity of those types of organisms, perhaps 10 million animal species and several hundred thousand plant species.

An ecosystem that has the maximum amount of diversity is the richest.

Publicly and among themselves biologists rightly celebrate the diversity of life on Earth... At the end of the day, however, their confession is heard by no one: they work with a single scientific sample-life on Earth.

A single tree in the tropical forest in the south of Mexico has more different species than some European countries.

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

The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.

The diversity of life is so stimulating for me.

The rainforests hold answers to questions we have yet to ask.

Nature is not a partisan, but out of her ample treasue house she produces children in infinite variety, of which she is equally the mother, and disowns none of them.

In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism-beetle, moss, and so forth, is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Mozart symphony, or any other great work of art.

Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.

It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.

Somewhere close I knew spear-nosed bats flew through the tree crowns in search of fruit, palm vipers coiled in ambush in the roots of orchids, jaguars walked the river's edge; around them eight hundred species of trees stood, more than are native to all of North America; and a thousand species of butterflies, 6 percent of the entire world fauna, waited for the dawn.

The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals.

A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.

The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. ... The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.