Heatstroke is an important and useful addition to the library on climate change, bringing insights from deep-time ecological research to help illuminate the dire forecasts of which we’re already so aware.
The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.
The elk are the most abundant large herbivores in the Yellowstone ecosystem. There are thousands and thousands of them. They migrate in and out. And those migration routes need to stay open.
Mathematics to me is like a language I don’t speak though I admire its literature in translation.
Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.
Islands are where species go to die.
Kill off the sacred bear. Kill off the ancestral crocodile. Kill off the myth-wrapped tiger. Kill off the lion. You haven’t conquered a people, or their place, until you’ve exterminated their resident monsters.
We should recognize that they reflect things that we’re doing, not just things that are happening to us. We should understand that, although some of the human-caused factors may seem virtually inexorable, others are within our control.
In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.
Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.” There’s a nice word: ramifications. It’s especially good in this context because, while the literal definition is “a structure formed of branches,” from the Latin ramus, of course the looser definition is “implications.” Darwin’s tree certainly had implications.
Mad cow disease is caused by a prion, a weirdly folded protein molecule that triggers weird folding in other molecules, like Kurt Vonnegut’s infectious form of water, ice-nine, in his great early novel Cat’s Cradle.
Identifying the new virus was only step one in solving the immediate mystery of Hendra, let alone understanding the disease in a wider context. Step two would involve tracking that virus to its hiding place. Where did it exist when it wasn’t killing horses and people? Step three would entail asking a further cluster of questions: How did the virus emerge from its secret refuge, and why here, and why now?
How do such diseases leap from nonhuman animals into people, and why do they seem to be leaping more frequently in recent years? To put the matter in its starkest form: Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly.
One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills – maybe even the cough – precede the major discharge of virus toward other people.
A high jeopardy of extinction comes with territory. Islands are where species go to die.
Then there was a new epidemic – of fear,” said Dr. Sam Okware, Commissioner of Health Services, when I visited him in Kampala a month later. Among Dr. Okware’s other duties, he served as chairman of the national Ebola virus task force. “That was the most difficult to contain,” he said. “There was a new epidemic – of panic.
Some of these viruses,” he warned, citing coronaviruses in particular, “should be considered as serious threats to human health. These are viruses with high evolvability and proven ability to cause epidemics in animal populations.
R0 explains and, to some limited degree, it predicts. It defines the boundary between a small cluster of weird infections in a tropical village somewhere, flaring up, burning out, and a global pandemic. It came from George MacDonald.
Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial.
The song of the dodo, if it had one, is forever unknowable because no human from whom we have testimony ever took the trouble to sit in the Mauritian forest and listen.