“There are worse sins for a scientist than to be wrong. One is to be trivial” – Robert MacArthur Scientifically speaking, one way to be to be trivial would involve collecting data (“facts”), but then doing nothing toward fitting those facts into a hypothesis that, if ultimately proven, would help fill in pieces of the...
“To do science is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts.” — Robert MacArthur Robert MacArthur was a brilliant theoretical ecologist and mathematician. He was also a naturalist who studied east coast warblers and the puzzle of how so many different birds could coexist within the same forest. Then he and E.O...
“Sky Islands, isolated mountains surrounded by radically different lowland environments...with some of the highest biodiversity in the world." — Sky Island Alliance One way to envision sky islands is as lifeboats, sanctuaries where life has persisted in the face of periodic swings in the Earth’s climate. Natural climate oscillations, prior to our current climate trajectory...
" Birds are an ecological litmus paper." — Roger Tory Peterson Since the beginning of life on earth four major groups of creatures independently evolved wings for self-powered flight (not just gliding). First there were insects. About 385 million years ago the first insects show up in the fossil record. However, they were scarce until...
“… imps of darkness … a hideous looking creature.” — Charles Darwin’s description of Galapagos Island marine iguanas I cringe every time I read this quote and try to console myself knowing that Darwin still viewed himself as a geologist and a future Anglican pastor when he and the Beagle visited the Galapagos Islands. Also...
“Life finds a way.” – Jeff Goldblum, Jurassic Park Our planet is about 4.5 billion years old. Sometime around 3.7 billion years ago, based on well accepted fossil evidence, we find the first signs of life. It could have been even earlier, but earlier fossil traces are less clear and rocks that old are hard...
"I don't get no respect!" — Rodney Dangerfield Rodney Dangerfield was a comedian popular on the television talk show circuit in the 1960s and 1970s. His self-effacing catchphrase was designed to elicit laughs, but it is also an unfortunately apt response to people’s perceptions of California’s deserts, and it is no laughing matter. California is...
“ Many of the medicines we use today, to fight everything from AIDS to cancer, originate as a toxin in an amphibian’s skin. When we lose these animals, we lose resources. We lose keystone species in the environments where they live ” — Jeff Corwin Although meant to be a compelling statement, I’m not sure...
“The Elders were wise. They knew that man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard. They knew that a lack of respect for growing living things, soon led to a lack of respect for humans too.” — Chief Luther Standing Bear, Sicangu and Oglala Chief Today, if you need food or clothes or a wrench, it...
“Yeah, but it's a dry heat.” — actor Bill Paxton (line from the movie “Aliens”) Deserts of this planet include the Gobi and Thar Deserts of Asia, the Sahara, Namib, Kalahari, and Karoo Deserts of Africa, the Atacama Desert of South America, the Great Victoria Desert of Australia (plus nine other somewhat smaller named desert...
“The desert tells a different story every time one ventures on it.” — Robert Edison Fulton Jr. Deserts of the western U.S. are deserts because of the rain shadow created by the Peninsular, Transverse, Sierra Nevada, and Cascade Mountain ranges. These majestic ranges create a hurdle to storms originating in or near the Bering Sea...
“ The only thing that is constant is change.” ― Heraclitus In our early pursuit of knowledge, or an understanding of the earth and our place in it, there was a belief that the earth as we know it now and the life that calls earth home has always been so. The belief was based...
“I am here tracing the History of the Earth itself, from its own Monuments” — Jean-Andre De Luc In December of 1831, when Charles Darwin set out from Plymouth England on the HMS Beagle, he was a geologist. Geology was the only field of science in which Darwin had anything resembling formal training. He attended...
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” — John Muir Deserts conjure images of extreme aridity, searing heat, and for naturalists, an appreciation for the array of solutions that animals and plants have developed for not only surviving, but thriving under these otherwise...
“No part of the world can be truly understood without a knowledge of its garment of vegetation, for this determines not only the nature of the animal inhabitants but also the occupations of the majority of human beings.” — Ellsworth Huntington Species exist in places that meet their needs with respect to food, cover, breeding...
"The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitants of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics. " — Ralph Waldo Emerson In deserts we marvel at nature’s adaptations to heat and aridity. Plants reduce or eliminate leaves and leaf area as...
“Biogeography typically trumps taxonomy and anticipates molecular phylogeny” — Dennis McCarthy McCarthy’s quote aims to get us still closer to what is a species. How organisms are distributed in time and space provides insights as to their degree of isolation and perhaps how long that isolation has occurred. The more complete the isolation, how much...
“ If I'm gonna tell a real story, I'm gonna start with my name.” — Kendrick Lamar While a one-definition-fits-all for what is a species continues to be elusive, species are nevertheless a foundation for understanding populations, natural communities, biodiversity, and evolution. Conservation efforts are also often species-centric, since conservation laws are explicitly species focused...
“… The term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also...
"It is that range of biodiversity that we must care for — the whole thing — rather than just one or two stars.” — Sir David Attenborough That range of biodiversity includes the panoply of life occupying a region. Everything from charismatic species (those one or two stars), bighorn sheep, collared lizards, wolves, and mountain...