Sheila

“We know that ecological isolation—either by seawater or by other sorts of delimitation—correlates strongly with risk of extinction”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

“Eighty traps seemed like a lot when we started walking. But at the end of two hours, Gordon and Tom and I haven’t collected a single snake. Maybe it’s the drought. Maybe the snake population, here in the north of the island as in the south, has passed the peak of its cycle and declined. Maybe the trap design is no good, or possibly we’re using the wrong bait. Temporarily, for whatever reason, B. irregularis has turned invisible. But the consequences of its presence surround us like a web.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

“The term refers to cascading disruptions that can pass between trophic levels—that is, between different categories of interrelated organisms in the hierarchy of energy transfer within an ecosystem.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

“The ecosystem itself is not just a landscape full of plant and animal species; it’s an intricate network of relationships, including those between predators and their prey, between flowering plants and their pollinators, between fruiting plants and the animals that disperse their seeds. Each such relationship constitutes a link between trophic levels.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions