Environment

"Should I kiss the viper's fang Or herald loud the death of Man I'm sinking in the quicksand of my thought And I ain't got the power anymore"

"Our mother's philosophy It feels like quicksand And if she sinks I'm going down with her"

"I have died a thousand days Just to feel this quicksand And every movement is embraced By this sweet frustration"

"Sergeant Calhoun: What is this? [sees sign] Nesquik-sand!? Fix-It Felix, Jr: Quicksand? Oh, I'll hop out and grab you one of those vines. [tries unsuccessfully to hop] I can't hop. I'm hopless. This is hopeless! We're gonna drown here! Sergeant Calhoun: Stop thrashing. Stop—stop, you're making us sink faster. [Felix continues thrashing] Get ahold of yourself! [hits Felix]"

"Henry "Mutt" Williams-Jones III: What is it, quicksand? Marion Ravenwood: I'm calm. Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones, Jr.: No, it's a drysand pit. Marion: I'm sinking, but I'm calm. "Indiana": Quicksand is a mix of sand, mud and water and depending on the viscosity it's not as dangerous as people sometimes think. Marion: For Pete's sake, Jones, we're not in school! "Indiana": Don't worry. There's nothing to worry about unless there's a… [suddenly there is a void collapse] …a void collapse."

"A quicksand of deceit."

"With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand…hopeless from the start."

"Making the best of things is … a damn poor way of dealing with them.... My whole life has been a series of escapes from that quicksand."

"Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity."

"Ecosystems are characterized by chemical cycling and energy flow, both of which begin when photosynthetic plants, aquatic algae, and some bacteria take in solar energy and inorganic nutrients to produce food in the form of organic nutrients."

"The organization of life extends beyond the individual organism to the biosphere, the zone of air, land, and water at the surface of the Earth where organisms exist. Individual organisms belong to a population, which is all the members of a species within a particular area. The populations of a community interact among themselves and with the physical environment (e.g., soil, atmosphere, and chemicals), thereby forming an ecosystem."

"I dare you to stand in a redwood grove and not be humbled, or to dive on a coral reef and see even just the glimmer of its former magnificence and have some respect for these ecosystems and the fact that we are sharing this planet."

"If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)... Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be."

"Planet Earth was separated into several ecosystems, each made up of a unique assembly of animals and plants. Homo sapiens was about to put an end to this biological exuberance."

"Animals do not survive by rational thought (nor by sign languages allegedly taught to them by psychologists). They survive through inborn reflexes and sensory-perceptual association. They cannot reason. They cannot learn a code of ethics. A lion is not immoral for eating a zebra (or even for attacking a man). Predation is their natural and only means of survival; they do not have the capacity to learn any other."

"Firefly females of the genus Photuris, long known to be carnivorous, attract and devour males of the genus Photinus by mimicking the flash-responses of Photinus females."

"Today, snares remain prevalent around the world. They are used in subsistence and commercial hunting (including the fur trade), poaching (including the bushmeat trade), recreational bushcraft, population control, predator and "pset" species control and occasionally research."

"Diverse feeding habits might act to buffer predator populations against fluctuations in nutrient availability of particular prey species."

"The extent that habitat structure influences spatial processes (e.g., numerical responses of predators, their inter-habitat dispersal, edge effects, and thus the coupling of predator-prey interactions in habitats compromised by human activity (e.g., fragmented landscapes) is also of immediate concern in conservation biology."

"The Challenge of Eating versus Being Eaten: Most prey that respond to predators also face a trade-off between increased survival in the presence of predators and slower growth and development. For example, many species of rotifers and cladocerons develop spines in response to fish and invertebrate predators."

"Sensory compensation is probably common in animals, for just about every species has at least two sensory modes that might be directed toward predator detection."

"Recent neurological work suggests that the amygdala (in the vertebrate midbrain) is a key component in the assessment of predation risk and that differences in risk perception may reflect differences in the neural architecture of the amygdala."

"The ability of animals to perceive changes in predation risk forms the foundation on which the nonlethal effects of predators are transmitted to prey populations and communities."

"Both predation and predator evasion are expensive and themselves dangerous. Some of the costs are metabolic, and these costs have been studied at length. Potentially more important, however, are the structural and behavioral trade-offs animals must make to be successful predators or long lived prey."

"A more common strategy some insects employ to avoid bad predation is to continue flying at night but to vary their seasonal activity (either just after or before bats hibernate)."

"Flying insects can exhibit other characteristics that protect them from bat predation (which may also reduce the selective pressure for evolving auditory defenses). In rare cases, nocturnal insects reduce their exposure to bat predation by becoming diurnal (and restricting their amount of time that they fly at night) or by flying only at dusk before bats emerge."

"Interactions between predators and prey are a major driving force for evolution and adaptation in animals. In any single encounter, the prey has more at stake, because failure means death, whereas the predator misses only a feeding opportunity."

"Whether a species is a traditional predator (or an omnivore), or whether it responds to predation risk with fixed rather than learned behaviors, its success as a predator or a prey is determined by the capacity and efficiency of its sensory organs."

"Populations exposed to varying predation threats, over time, may be selected toward the use of a learned response, because it would allow individuals to optimize the threat-sensitive trade-offs between survival and other fitness related benefits."

"Trinidadian guppies from a high-predation population exhibited a more intense antipredator response than conspecifics from a low-predation-risk population."

"...predator avoidance can lead to delayed ontogenetic niche shifts, resulting in decreased growth rates"

"An individual's response to local predation risk is shaped by the conflicting demands of predator avoidance and the benefits associated with a suite of fitness-related behaviors, such as foraging, mating and terrestrial defense."

"Historically, predation and competition has received much more attention than mutualism. This bias is exemplified in the attention given to inter-specific interactions in ecology textbooks."

"Variation in plant food, especially flowers, has a strong effect on the dispersal of most omnivorous insect predators."

"Regardless of whether one defines predator-prey interactions narrowly or broadly, what is clear is that at one point or another in the lives of most animals they are predators, prey, or both."

"What is a predator? The answer is relatively straightforward for many species: an animal that eats another animal. However, recent research has shown that for other species the answer is more complex and that predatory species may not be as diet-limited as previously assumed."

"In prehistoric times, Homo sapiens were deeply endangered. Early humans were less fleet of foot, with fewer natural weapons and less well-honed senses than all the predators that threatened them. Moreover, they were hampered in their movements by the need to protect their uniquely immature young - juicy meals for any hungry beast."

"Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers."

"What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency—chaos, complexity, life."

"The simple facts are that both predation and starvation are painful prospects for deer, and that the lion's lot is no more enviable."

"Man and animals are really the passage and the conduit of food, the sepulchre of animals and resting place of the dead, one causing the death of the other, making themselves the covering for the corruption of other dead [bodies]."

"Predation can not become the habitual, conventional resource of any group or any class until industrial methods have been developed to such a degree of efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for, above the subsistence of those engaged in getting a living....The early development of tools and of weapons is of course the same fact seen from two different points of view. ...The predatory phase of culture is therefore conceived to come on gradually."

"When the predatory habit of life has been settled upon the group by long habituation, it becomes the able-bodied man's accredited office in the social economy or elude him, to overcome and reduce to subservience those alien forces that assert themselves refractorily in the environment."

"And even for the survivors, life involves a constant struggle to find enough food, avoid predators, and overcome sickness and injury for a few brief years (or months) before death comes at the jaws of a predator or the grip of a parasite. Pain is a powerful motivational tool, and evolution has no qualms about using it to maximum effect."

"[W]hile many animals appear to endure such conditions rather calmly, this doesn't necessarily mean they aren't suffering. Sick and injured members of a prey species are the easiest to catch, so predators deliberately target these individuals. As a consequence, those prey that appear sick or injured will be the ones killed most often. Thus, evolutionary pressure pushes prey species to avoid drawing attention to their suffering."

"Nature can be cruel. Predators are everywhere. Those who don't need to be protected from outside forces often need to be protected from themselves. In society, women are referred to as "the fairer sex". But in the wild, the female species can be far more ferocious than their male counterparts. Defending the nest is both our oldest and strongest instinct. And sometimes, it can also be the most gratifying."

"Heartless though it may seem to some, among the least harmful things to eat are sustainably culled wild animals. In the absence of natural predators, deer populations in parts of Britain have reached such dense numbers that the woodlands they browse fail to regenerate."

"Naysayers at their polite best chided the rewilders for romanticizing the past; at their sniping worst, for tempting a 'Jurassic Park' disaster. To these the rewilders quietly voiced a sad and stinging reply. The most dangerous experiment is already underway. The future most to be feared is the one now dictated by the status quo. In vanquishing our most fearsome beasts from the modern world, we have released worse monsters from the compound. They come in disarmingly meek and insidious forms, in chewing plagues of hoofed beasts and sweeping hordes of rats and cats and second-order predators. They come in the form of denuded seascapes and barren forests, ruled by jellyfish and urchins, killer deer and sociopathic monkeys. They come as haunting demons of the human mind. In conquering the fearsome beasts, the conquerors had unwittingly orphaned themselves."

"For many decades, ecology textbooks presented classical competition theory without reservation. The central principle here is that two species sharing an essential resource that is in limited supply cannot coexist for long because the competitively superior species will eliminate the other one. The implication is that ecological communities should be characterized by division of resources among species, or niche partitioning. Predation and physical disturbance inflict so much damage on biotas of the seafloor that populations of one species seldom monopolize a potentially limiting resource, except sporadically and locally. As a result, it is uncommon for any species to drive another to extinction through competitive exclusion—or even to force another species to drastically change its exploitation of any environmental resource throughout its geographic range."

"Not long ago I was sleeping in a cabin in the woods and was awoken in the middle of the night by the sounds of a struggle between two animals. Cries of terror and extreme agony rent the night, intermingled with the sounds of jaws snapping bones and flesh being torn from limbs. One animal was being savagely attacked, killed and then devoured by another. [I]t seems to me that the horror I experienced on that dark night in the woods was a veridical insight. What I experienced was a brief and terrifying glimpse into the ultimately evil dimension of a godless world."