ecology

"Baldner contends that is "arrogant" and "paternalistic" morally to condemn something as definitive of the natural order as predation. However, it is in the nature of morality to devise ideals of a better world and to work toward realizing them. This entails judging this world to be less than ideal and working to change it. One could restrict moral evaluations to the products of human activity, but that would be arbitrary: what makes suffering (prima facie) morally bad is not that it is the result of human activity but that it is suffering. Our commitment to making the world a morally better place impels us to make moral evaluations of the natural order. There need be nothing either arrogant or paternalistic in making and acting on such evaluations, provided we recognize the very limited nature of our understanding and our power to make improvements."

"[A]nimals are not just subject to suffering like man, but subject to much more suffering; their existence is considered to be extremely unhappy, not only because they are exploited and tortured by man but also in nature itself, where the weaker one is threatened and devoured by the stronger, and, moreover, because at least many of them live on disgusting food or in uncomfortable places."

"One simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain [...] is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured."

"[H]e saw in Java a plain far as the eye could reach entirely covered with skeletons, and took it for a battlefield; they were, however, merely the skeletons of large turtles, five feet long and three feet broad, and the same height, which come this way out of the sea in order to lay their eggs, and are then attacked by wild dogs , who with their united strength lay them on their backs, strip off their lower armour, that is, the small shell of the stomach, and so devour them alive. But often then a tiger pounces upon the dogs. Now all this misery repeats itself thousands and thousands of times, year out, year in. For this, then, these turtles are born. For whose guilt must they suffer this torment? Where fore the whole scene of horror? To this the only answer is: it is thus that the will to live objectifies itself."

"I bought from some villagers a young osprey they had caught on a sandbank, in order to rescue it from their cruel hands. But then I had to decide whether I should let it starve, or kill a number of small fishes every day in order to keep it alive. I decided on the latter course, but every day the responsibility to sacrifice one life for another caused me pain."

"It must be admitted that the existence of carnivorous animals does pose one problem for the ethics of Animal Liberation, and that is whether we should do anything about it. Assuming that humans could eliminate carnivorous species from the earth, and that the total amount of suffering among animals in the world were thereby reduced, should we do it?"

"Remove the predators, and the whole ecosystem begins to crash like a house of cards. As the sharks disappear, the predator-prey balance dramatically shifts, and the health of our oceans declines."

"I think that most people would associate big schools of fish with healthy coral reefs. At Kingman, the predators keep the herd thin, so there aren't a lot of big fish schools."

"I have come to view vegetarianism as a standing protest against predation, which is life's greatest evil. If there were no other argument in its favor, that would be sufficient."

"[Predation is] a great evil that a wise or benevolent creator would have avoided."

"Earth has no more distressing spectacle than that of a predator suddenly striking down some defenseless creature innocently singing or attending its young, no sight more pitifully repulsive than the hideously mangled remains of what, a few hours before, was a beautiful animal enjoying its life."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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]."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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)."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"If the human population of the world continues to increase at its current rate, there will soon be no room for either wild life or wild places … But I believe that sooner or later man will learn to limit his overpopulation. Then he will be much more concerned with optimum rather than maximum, quality rather than quantity, and will recover the need within himself for contact with wilderness and wild nature."

"Large events to us but to these mountains? Nothing. That's what I love about the empty places of the world; places with few people and little to see save earth, sky, mountains and cold, cold stars. They help me keep matters in perspective."

"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."

"To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from."

"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."

"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a member of the natural community, a wanderer who visits but does not remain and whose travels leave only trails."