Aquatic Animals Quotes

It would make it that much harder to delude ourselves that humanity's ancestors, alone in the animal kingdom, lost their hair by wandering out into the sunshine.

Animals have so much to teach us. The sad reality is, unfortunately, most humans destroy or kill what they do not know, understand or value. That is how we are as a species.

Ebola is a zoonosis. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918–1919, which had its ultimate source in a wild aquatic bird and, after passing through some combination of domesticated animals (a duck in southern China, a sow in Iowa?) emerged to kill as many as 50 million people before receding into obscurity.

I found myself drawn to biology, with all its frustrating yet fascinating complexities. When I was twelve, I remember reading about axolotls, which are basically a species of salamander that has evolved to remain permanently in the aquatic larval stage. They manage to keep their gills (rather than trading them in for lungs, like salamanders or frogs) by shutting down metamorphosis and becoming sexually mature in the water. I was completely flabbergasted when I read that by simply giving these creatures the “metamorphosis hormone” (thyroid extract) you could make the axolotl revert back into the extinct, land-dwelling, gill-less adult ancestor that it had evolved from. You could go back in time, resurrecting a prehistoric animal that no longer exists anywhere on Earth. I also knew that for some mysterious reason adult salamanders don’t regenerate amputated legs but the tadpoles do. My curiosity took me one step further, to the question of whether an axolotl—which is, after all, an “adult tadpole”—would retain its ability to regenerate a lost leg just as a modern frog tadpole does. And how many other axolotl-like beings exist on Earth, I wondered, that could be restored to their ancestral forms by simply giving them hormones? Could humans—who are after all apes that have evolved to retain many juvenile qualities—be made to revert to an ancestral form, perhaps something resembling Homo erectus, using the appropriate cocktail of hormones? My mind reeled out a stream of questions and speculations, and I was hooked on biology forever. I found mysteries and possibilities everywhere.

He got out of bed in sections, like a poorly made automaton, and carried his hands into the bathroom. He turned on the cold water. When the basin was full, he plunged his hands in up to the wrists. They lay quietly on the bottom like a pair of strange aquatic animals. When they were thoroughly chilled and began to crawl about, he lifted them out and hid them in a towel. He was cold. He ran hot water into the tub and began to undress, fumbling with the buttons of his clothing as though he were undressing a stranger. He was naked before the tub was full enough to get in and he sat down on a stool to wait. He kept his enormous hands folded quietly on his belly. Although absolutely still, they seemed curbed rather than resting.

The branch of fungi leading to animals evolved to capture nutrients by surrounding their food with cellular sacs, essentially primitive stomachs. As species emerged from aquatic habitats, organisms adapted means to prevent moisture loss. In terrestrial creatures, skin composed of many layers of cells emerged as a barrier against infection. Taking a different evolutionary path, the mycelium retained its netlike form of interweaving chains of cells and went underground, forming a vast food web upon which life flourished.

The aquatic environment must be safeguarded by men. God created mankind to care for the environment and all the living resources.

Population genetics calculations suggest that in 5 million years (one million years longer than the alleged time between Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus), animals with generation lines of about ten years (typical of whales) could substitute no more than about 1,700 mutations.6 This is not nearly enough to generate the new information that whales need for aquatic life, even assuming that all the hypothetical information-adding mutations required for this could somehow arise. (And as shown in chapter 9, real science shows that this cannot occur.)

scientists now argue that the primordial source of all flu strains is migrating aquatic birds such as ducks and geese that have roamed the earth for more than a hundred million years. The flu, it turns out, is all about our relationship with birds.

It came to me in whole form… that the energy of the Universe swirled and coalesced and formed into suns and cooling planets orbiting those suns. And on the planets (one specifically that I know of) the energy started swirling and coalescing into electrons and forming molecules and those merged and joined and formed microscopic life, that in turn gave rise to aquatic things, and plants and animals and beings that walked on two legs that loved and had children that in turn loved. So that all the planet is connected by the energy of the Universe, and I am part of it.

But compared with much of the rest of the world, Europe is a beacon of enlightenment. Among the many amazing and depressing facts in his book, Roberts gives a list of all the aquatic life incidentally killed—the bycatch, as it is known—by a fishing boat in the Pacific Ocean in the process of legally catching 211 mahi-mahi. Among the aquatic animals hauled aboard and tossed back dead after a single sweep were: 488 turtles 455 stingrays and devil rays 460 sharks 68 sailfish 34 marlin 32 tuna 11 wahoo 8 swordfish 4 giant sunfish This was legal under international protocols. The hooks on the longlines were certified as “turtle friendly.” All this was to give 211 people a dinner of mahi-mahi. —

The number of living creatures of all orders whose existence intimately depends on kelp is wonderful. A great volume might be written describing the inhabitants of one of these beds of seaweed…. I can only compare these great aquatic forests…with terrestrial ones in the intertropical regions. Yet, if in any other country a forest was destroyed, I do not believe so many species of animals would perish as would here, from the destruction of kelp

The ocean made space for me, pressing against the blackness of my assumed skin, buoying me and counter-acting the heaviness of the lead fastened around my waist. I kicked and continued my initial dive, feeling the pressures sliding back against my belly and legs, the quiet acceptance of the seas. Space and oceans have much in common, both are alien to us, not our element, both contain mysteries, dangers, sudden beauties of their own and beyond our land-bound experience. But space is a container of nothingness, a vacuum, a void of immeasurable loneliness and occasional transcendence. Water is a repository of life, and the life asserts itself as you move through the ocean; creatures large and small, beautiful or stunningle grotesque according to their custom, aquatic forests and microscopic landscapes, beings caught between the layers of life, rocks made of living creatures and living creatures made of stone, vegetable animals and animated plants and sudden deep, heart-breaking, lovely jewels that flick their trailing rainbows and dart away from you between the fronds of weeds, leaving shimmering mysteries that can be pursued, but never truly caught and comprehended. Space does not care whether you are there or not, and the struggle to survive between worlds is a fight to avoid being sucked into a vacuum, into an ultimate nil. Implacable in its indifference, it kills you simply because it is, and crushes you with the weight of your knowledge of its indifference. But the ocean is not indifferent. It reacts and shapes itself to your presence or absence, presents its laws as implacable realities, but an instant later displays the very non-exemplar of that rule swimming calmly through the depths. Accept the strangeness and the ocean opens to you, gives you freedom and beauty, a hook into otherness. But wonder approached in fear is cancelled, disappears into threathening shiverings of distant plants, into terrifying movements of bulky darkness through the rocks.

Fiorito’s lab was arranged with two rows of tanks lining a central walkway, one octopus in each tank. (Octopuses are generally not social creatures and can even be cannibalistic.) On this particular day, David had chosen a tank in the left-hand row, about halfway along. When I walked in to see what was going on, I was astonished to see all the octopuses on the other side of the walkway pressed up against the glass of their tanks, every one of them staring intently at David while he repeatedly lowered his objects into his chosen tank. The observing octopuses seemed to be trying to figure out what was going on for no other reason than the sheer interest of it. Being among octopuses, even for a short time, left me with an impression of an intelligence, and a conscious presence, very different from any other – and certainly very different from our own human incarnation. This of course was a subjective impression, necessarily tainted by the biases of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, and open to the charge of taking intelligence as a sign of sentience. But the octopus is objectively remarkable too, and spending some time with them can push our intuitions about how different a non-human consciousness might be. The most recent common ancestor of humans and octopuses lived about 600 million years ago. Little is known about this ancient creature. Perhaps it was some kind of flattened worm. Whatever it looked like, it must have been a very simple animal. Octopus minds are not aquatic spinoffs from our own, or indeed from any other species with a backbone, past or present. The mind of an octopus is an independently created evolutionary experiment, as close to the mind of an alien as we are likely to encounter on this planet. As scuba-diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith put it, ‘If we want to understand other minds, the minds of cephalopods are the most other of all.

Father Thames drifts beside misty heath Dark surfaces veil universes beneath, Hushed verge our temple, tall hedge my altar, Heeding eerie owl calls some reveal they have heard, long-expected wintery freeze, Unending run which travels further east, Aquatic animals receive refuge below.

The blue whale’s head is flat with a distinctive ridge, and it has a U-shape.

Receding for miles on either side into a flushed, still sky are overhanging pale blue cliffs hundreds of feet high, their bases fretted by little arches, the entrances to caves running in along the level of a bay masked by perfect waves. On the middle of that quiet floor sits a fleet of small black ships, square-rigged, sails furled, motionless, their spars like burnt match-sticks. And high above them, over the tall cliffs’ semi-translucent ranks, are scribbled hundreds of fine black birds hanging in n’s in banks. One can hear their crying, crying, the only sound there is except for occasional sighing as a large aquatic animal breathes. In the pink light the small red sun goes rolling, rolling, round and round and round at the same height in perpetual sunset, comprehensive, consoling, while the ships consider it. Apparently they have reached their destination. It would be hard to say what brought them there, commerce or contemplation.

Gender issues are fundamentally a developmental problem that has its roots in pollution. It is seen constantly near polluted rivers and in animals and aquatic life that use the water.

...the conceptual commitment account is actually quite psychological. It is far from drawing an airtight distinction. Quite often, whether or not a person considers a subject to be in a predicate will be relative to that person's knowledge, intuitions, personality, etc.. For example, it was common in the ancient world (and is still common in non-scientific cultures) to classify whales with fish. Such a person would consider 'A whale is a fish' to be analytic--the concept of fish includes whale. A Kantian might reply that this mistaken evaluation is due to the person's ignorance. A biologist would even claim that the statement, 'A whale is a fish' is analytically false. But we must not make such hasty judgements. After all, if the person is not working with scientific definitions of 'fish' or 'mammal,' he has not necessarily misclassified the whale. After all, there are obvious analogies between whales and fish. If somone who has not taken a modern biology class defines 'fish' simply to be an aquatic animal, he is perfectly justified in including whales in the category of fish. In other words, for him, according to his vocabulary and definitions, the truth is analytic. Thus, what might be analytic for one person could be synthetic for another and Kant has given no way to resolve such disputes.

than 57 billion animals a year, not counting fish and other aquatic animals, which involves probably another trillion animals at the least. A billion is one thousand million. A trillion is one million million. So every year, we are responsible for a staggering number of deaths.

So, in the end, what’s the best justification that we have for imposing suffering and death on 57 billion land animals and at least a trillion aquatic animals, whom we do not need to consume for nutritional purposes, and given that this consumption results in ecological devastation?

This is the tale of 'Anguillette'," Henriette de Murat begins, rehearsed and fluent. "Now, to whatever greatness destiny may elevate those it favors, I think we will all agree there is no escape in this world from sorrow. Even fairies themselves have a burden to endure. Did you know that these creatures have the misfortune of being compelled to change their shape, a few days in every lunar month? It is true, they become their animal selves, whether that beast is celestial, terrestrial, or aquatic! So it was that at her time of the month, the fairy Anguillette found that she transformed into a thick, slick, muscular eel, whose skin glistened with a rainbow...

God gave man the authority to rule and protect all the animals in the aquatic ecosystems.

God gave mankind a divine duty to protect all the animals in the aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.

something that grows or lives in or near the water cetacean class of large aquatic mammals, including whales, dolphins, and porpoises, with hairless bodies and broad flippers cryptozoologist researcher who studies and searches for animals whose

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Canadian team created the Enviropig, an environmentally friendly transgenic pig containing an E. coli gene that allowed the animals to better digest a phosphorus-containing compound called phytate. Normal pig manure retains high phosphorus levels that leach into streams and rivers, causing algal blooms, the death of aquatic animals, and the production of greenhouse gases; Enviropig manure contained 75 percent less phosphorus, which could have been an enormous benefit to the planet and to the people who lived and worked near pig farms. Despite this, though, and despite reassuring safety data, consumers decried the Enviropig, causing the project’s financial backers to pull the plug.