David Attenborough Quotes

It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.

No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experiened

The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it.

What about volcanoes?" "What about them?" "All that lava comes up from center of the earth where it is all hot. I saw a program, it had David Attenborough, so it's true.

I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…

We moved from being a part of nature to being apart from nature.

We only know a tiny proportion about the complexity of the natural world. Wherever you look, there are still things we don’t know about and don’t understand. [...] There are always new things to find out if you go looking for them.

We live our comfortable lives in the shadow of a disaster of our own making. That disaster is being brought about by the very things that allow us to live our comfortable lives.

I don't think whole populations are villainous, but Americans are just extraordinarily unaware of all kinds of things. If you live in the middle of that vast continent, with apparently everything your heart could wish for just because you were born there, then why worry? [...] If people lose knowledge, sympathy and understanding of the natural world, they're going to mistreat it and will not ask their politicians to care for it.

I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.

The fact is that no species has ever had such wholesale control over everything on earth, living or dead, as we now have. That lays upon us, whether we like it or not, an awesome responsibility. In our hands now lies not only our own future, but that of all other living creatures with whom we share the earth.

‎Using his burgeoning intelligence, this most successful of all mammals has exploited the environment to produce food for an ever increasing population. Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it's time we controlled the population to allow the survival of the environment.

David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e., that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali.

We often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to save ourselves. With or without us, the wild will return.

We have come as far as we have because we are the cleverest creatures to have ever lived on Earth. But if we are to continue to exist, we will require more than intelligence. We will require wisdom.

We have a finite environment—the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.

Young people: They care. They know that this is the world that they're going to grow up in, that they're going to spend the rest of their lives in. But, I think it's more idealistic than that. They actually believe that humanity, human species, has no right to destroy and despoil regardless.

This last chapter .. may have given the impression that somehow man is the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all these millions of years of development have had no purpose other than to put him on earth. There is no scientific evidence whatever to support such a view and no reason to suppose that our stay here will be any more permanent than that of the dinosaur.

I saw a program. It had David Attenborough, so it’s true.

I know of no pleasure deeper than that which comes from contemplating the natural world and trying to understand it.

We humans, alone on Earth, are powerful enough to create worlds, and then destroy them.

I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.

We ourselves (one single species) have taken over vast tracts of the inhabitable surface of the planet. Surely, we should allow those other creatures we share the planet with to retain some part of their ancient heritage.

At the end of the day, the harsh reality is that if you’re a fan of Kate Bush, Charles Dickens, Scrabble, David Attenborough and University Challenge, then there’s not much out there for you in terms of a youth movement.

We are at a unique stage in our history. Never before have we had such an awareness of what we are doing to the planet, and never before have we had the power to do something about that. Surely we all have a responsibility to care for our Blue Planet. The future of humanity and indeed, all life on earth, now depends on us.

To restore stability to our planet, therefore, we must restore its biodiversity, the very thing we have removed. It is the only way out of this crisis that we ourselves have created. We must rewild the world!

We often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to save ourselves.

Ninety-six percent of the mass of all the mammals on Earth is made up of our bodies and those of the animals that we raise to eat.

Beef makes up about a quarter of the meat that we eat, and only 2 per cent of our calories, yet we dedicate 60 per cent of our farmland to raising it.

All we require is the will. The next few decades represent a final opportunity to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. Our future on the planet, the only place as far as we know where life of any kind exists, is at stake.

Everything is set for us to win this future. We have a plan. We know what to do. There is a path to sustainability. It is a path that could lead to a better future for all life on Earth. We must let our politicians and business leaders know that we understand this, that this vision for the future is not just something we need, it is something, above all, that we want.

Our first point of discussion is the hunt. (...) My idea is to start the film with an image of the vixen locked out of her lair which has been plugged up. Her terror as she's pursued across the country. This is a big deal. It means training a fox from birth or dressing up a dog to look like a fox. Or hiring David Attenbrorough, who probably knows a few foxes well enough to ask a favour.

With or without us, the wild will return. .... It seems that, however grave our mistakes, nature will be able to overcome them, given the chance. The living world has survived mass extinctions several times before. But we humans cannot assume that we will do the same.

Wherever women have the vote, wherever girls stay in school for longer, wherever women are in charge of their own lives and not dictated to by men, wherever they have access to good healthcare and contraption, wherever they are free to take any job and their aspirations for life are raised, the birth rate falls. The reason for this is straightforward - empowerment brings freedom of choice and when life offers more options for women, their choice is often to have fewer children.

Anybody who thinks there can be limitless growth in a static, limited environment is either mad or an economist.

It seems that, however grave our mistakes, nature will be able to overcome them, given the chance.

The greater the biodiversity, the more secure will be all life on Earth,

The natural world is fading. The evidence is all around. It has happened during my lifetime. I have seen it with my own eyes. It will lead to our destruction.

I saw a program. It had David Attenborough, so it’s true.

I saw a program. It had David Attenborough, so it’s true.” The other Them looked

I was asked rather suddenly to join a delegation going to China, early October (alas John couldn’t come because of Oxford term). (Another member was David Attenborough, the very nice animal TV man.)

Now, over half of us live in an urban environment. My home, too, is here in the city of London. Looking down on this great metropolis, the ingenuity with which we continue to reshape the surface of our planet is very striking. It’s also very sobering, and reminds me of just how easy it is for us to lose our connection with the natural world. Yet it’s on this connection that the future of both humanity and the natural world will depend. And surely, it is our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth.

It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest; the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living. Sir David Attenborough

Wallace would have none of it. In reviewing The Descent of Man he wrote, ‘Are we to believe that the actions of an ever varying fancy for a slight change of colour could produce and fix the definite colours and markings which actually characterise species?’ Furthermore, he said, it was unacceptable to suggest that birds had an aesthetic sense. That would be crediting a bird with a human characteristic for which there was no evidence. It would be anthropomorphism at its most unjustified.

The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?

If we were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if they were to disappear, the land’s ecosystems would collapse.

Give and take, that is the essence of what balance is all about.

Invention accumulates. If you combine the diesel engine, GPS, and the echo sounder, the opportunities they create are not just added to one another, they are multiplied.

Modesty is one of his endearing qualities.

Attenborough's role was more fundamental. He launched the strand in 1968, when he was head of BBC2.

We only see a tiny fraction of that creature’s existence. There is a huge amount of its life that we have no knowledge of.

The standard nature film had been a staid biography of an animal, or the story of a habitat told throughout a year.

Life on Earth, took three years to make. First shown in 1979,

Living Planet, and spent another three years exploring the Earth’s environments and the way way plants and animals adapt to their surroundings.

Most plants take their nourishment intravenously, miraculously served up in molecule-sized morsels by leaf and root.

The flower economy is based on nectar.

The BBC's flagship natural history programme, was first shown in 1977, with The Bird That Beat The US Navy.

We humans, alone on Earth, are powerful enough to create worlds, and then to destroy them.

I think we're lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse.

For life to truly thrive on this planet, there must be immense biodiversity. Only when billions of different individual organisms make the most of every resource and opportunity they encounter, and millions of species lead lives that interlock so that they sustain each other, can the planet run efficiently. The greater the biodiversity, the more secure will be all life on Earth, including ourselves. Yet the way we humans are now living on Earth is sending biodiversity into a decline.

A species of willow developed that does not grow vertically upwards, like it's European and American relatives. To do so would to risk being flattened by the ferocious Artic wind. Instead it grows horizontally, keeping close to the ground. Even in the most favorable circumstances it seldom exceeds four inches in height. But it may become as long as some if it's southern relatives are tall. When you walk across a carpet of such prostrate tree, you are, in effect walking over a woodland canopy.

L’homo sapiens, l’essere umano saggio, deve imparare dai suoi sbagli e dimostrarsi all’altezza del suo nome. Noi che viviamo oggi abbiamo il fondamentale compito di assicurarci che succeda. Non dobbiamo perdere la speranza. Abbiamo tutti gli strumenti che ci servono, i pensieri e le idee di miliardi di menti straordinarie e le incommensurabili energie della natura per sostenere la nostra impresa. E abbiamo un’altra cosa, un’abilità unica tra le creature viventi sul pianeta: quella di immaginare un futuro e impegnarci per realizzarlo.

It took a million years of unprecedented volcanic activity during the Permian to poison the ocean. We have begun to do so again in less than two hundred. By burning fossil fuels, we are releasing carbon dioxide captured by prehistoric plants over millions of years in a few decades.

We can’t cut down rainforests forever. And anything that we can’t do forever is by definition, unsustainable. If we do things that are unsustainable, the damage accumulates, ultimately, to a point where the whole system collapses. No ecosystem, not matter how big, is secure. Even one as vast as the ocean.

The Earth’s last forests, rainforests, wetlands, grasslands and woodlands are, in fact, priceless. They are the carbon stores that we cannot afford to unlock. They offer environmental services that we cannot do without. They are home to biodiversity that we must not lose. How can we come to represent all that in our value systems?

And what effect might all this have had on life beneath the seas? Well, little, we hope, but we actually have no idea. We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas. Even the most substantial ocean creatures are often remarkably little known to us—including the most mighty of them all, the great blue whale, a creature of such leviathan proportions that (to quote David Attenborough) its “tongue weighs as much as an elephant, its heart is the size of a car and some of its blood vessels are so wide that you could swim down them.” It is the most gargantuan beast that Earth has yet produced, bigger even than the most cumbrous dinosaurs.

As the trees died, their bodies fell into the swamps and accumulated underwater, being slowly entombed by sediment brought down by the rivers. Beyond the reach of oxygen and the normal processes of decomposition, their carbon-laden tissues, buried beneath mud and sand, were compressed and eventually became coal. Subsequently, over several hundred million years, plankton and algae that flourished in ancient seas and stagnant lakes have, on occasions, been buried at depth and turned into oil and inflammable gas.

The revolution caused by the sharing of experience and the spread of knowledge had begun. The Chinese, a thousand years ago, gave it further impetus by devising mechanical means of reproducing such marks in great numbers. In Europe, Johann Gutenberg independently, though much later, developed the technique of printing from movable type. Today, our libraries, the descendants of those mud tablets, can be regarded as immense communal brains, memorising far more than any one human brain could hold. More than that, they can be seen as extra-corporeal DNA, adjuncts to our genetic inheritance as important and influential in determining the way we behave as the chromosomes in our tissues are in determining the physical shape of our bodies. It was this accumulated wisdom that eventually enabled us to devise ways of escaping the dictates of the environment. Our knowledge of agricultural techniques and mechanical devices, of medicine and engineering, of mathematics and space travel, all depend on stored experience. Cut off from our libraries and all they represent and marooned on a desert island, any one of us would be quickly reduced to the life of a hunter-gatherer.

Like most things that thrive in harsh environments, lichens are slow-growing. It may take a lichen more than half a century to attain the dimensions of a shirt button. Those the size of dinner plates, writes David Attenborough, are therefore "likely to be hundreds if not thousands of years old." It would be hard to imagine a less fulfilling existence. "They simply exist," Attenborough adds, "testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake." It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours- arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be. But- and here's an interesting point- for the most part it doesn't want to be much. p336

Both chi-chaks and tokays have discovered that the lights used at night by human beings in their houses attract great numbers of flying insects, so they establish their territories nearby, quite unconcerned by the presence of people a few yards away. Often a single gecko will claim the entire area illuminated on the ceiling by a bulb and aggressively chase away any other that dares to venture on to it. The tokay repeats its two-syllable call about half a dozen times and then ends each sequence with a low gargle. The number of repetitions, however, varies and the local people, who are often dedicated gamblers, will sit late into the night placing extravagant bets on how many times a male will next repeat himself.

We have less than a decade to switch from fossil fuels to clean energy. We have already increased global temperature by 1oC from pre-industrial levels. If we are to halt its increase at 1.5oC, there is a limit to the amount of carbon we can yet add to the atmosphere–our carbon budget–and, at current emissions rates, we will add this amount before the end of the decade.6 Our careless use of fossil fuels has set us the greatest and most urgent challenge we have ever faced. If we do make the transition to renewables at the lightning speed required, humankind will forever look back on this generation with gratitude, for we are indeed the first to truly understand the problem–and the last with a chance to do anything about it.

my reworking of that marvellous list. 1. Live as enjoyably as you can within financial reason. 2. If you have a bath, draw an inch or two of cold water and splash about in it. A cold shower will have the same uplifting effect. 3. Never stay up all night watching Netflix Originals about serial killers. 4. DON’T THINK TOO FAR AHEAD. EVENING IS FINE, BUT TOMORROW CAN LOOK AFTER ITSELF. 5. Keep reasonably busy. 6. See as much as you can of the friends who like you, support you and make you laugh. See as little as you can of the friends who judge you, compare you to others and tire you (and don’t pretend you don’t know who they are). 7. Apply the same rules to casual acquaintances. If your instincts tell you they are toxic, walk away and don’t look back. 8. If you are low in the water, do not pretend that you aren’t. It makes it so much worse, and A STIFF UPPER LIP ONLY GIVES YOU A SORE JAW. 9. Good coffee and tea are a genuine help. 10. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES OR FOR ANY REASON AT ANY TIME COMPARE YOURSELF TO ANYONE ELSE. 11. Cultivate a gentle, healthy pessimism. It can result in more nice surprises. 12. Avoid drama about what is wrong with the world (unless it is funny), emotionally powerful music, other sad people, and anything likely to make you feel anxious or that you are not doing enough. 13. RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS ARE HUMAN ANTIDEPRESSANTS. 14. Form a close bond with a local tree. 15. Make the room you most like sitting in as much of a comfy nest as you can. 16. Listen to David Attenborough. 17. STOP JUDGING YOURSELF. STOP PUNISHING YOURSELF. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT. 18. Keep warm. 19. Think as much as you can about space, infinity and the beyond. Anything that much bigger than you can be very relaxing. 20. Trust me.

Already in 2011 the world was 0.8ºC warmer on average than it was when I was born. That is a speed of change that exceeds any that has happened in the last 10,000 years.

By 2011, the extent of the summer sea ice in the Arctic had shrunk by 30 percent in 30 years.

Prypjatin asukkaat näkivät ensimmäiseksi jättimäisen ydinvoimalan, joka eräänä päivänä tuhoaisi heidän elämänsä. Suurin osa asukkaista oli siellä töissä. Muut saivat toimeentulonsa voimalan työntekijöiden kautta. Monet varmasti ymmärsivät, miten vaarallista on asua niin lähellä voimalaa, mutta en usko, että yksikään olisi halunnut sammuttaa reaktorit. Tšernobyl oli antanut heille jotain arvokasta: mukavan elämän. Nyt me kaikki olemme prypjatilaisia. Vietämme mukavaa elämää itse aiheuttamamme katastrofin varjossa. Tämä katastrofi syntyy juuri niistä samoista asioista, jotka tarjoavat meille mahdollisuuden mukavaan elämään. Ja on aivan ymmärrettävää jatkaa samaan malliin, kunnes löytyy vakuuttava syy lopettaa ja oikein hyvä vaihtoehtoinen suunnitelma.

Launched by William and Sir David Attenborough in October 2020, the Earthshot Prize awards one million British pounds to five individuals or teams whose work offers “ingenious solutions to repair and regenerate our planet.

Quick! Contact David Attenborough… Dinosaurs clearly still roam the Earth,’ I groaned.

At 10 a.m. on 28 August, the rock roof of the chamber, insufficiently supported by lava beneath, could bear the weight of the ocean and its floor no longer. It collapsed. Millions of tons of water fell on to the molten lava in the chamber and two-thirds of the island tumbled on top of it. The result was an explosion of such magnitude that it produced perhaps the loudest noise ever to echo round the world in recorded history.

We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.’ We had all simultaneously realised that our home was not limitless – there was an edge to our existence.

When I look back at my earlier films now, I realise that, although I felt I was out there in the wild, wandering through a pristine natural world, that was an illusion. Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying. Many of the larger animals were already rare. A shifting baseline has distorted our perception of all life on Earth. We have forgotten that once there were temperate forests that would take days to traverse, herds of bison that would take four hours to pass, and flocks of birds so vast and dense that they darkened the skies. Those things were normal only a few lifetimes ago. Not any more. We have become accustomed to an impoverished planet.

Since the 1950s, on average, wild animal populations have more than halved. When I look back at my earlier films now, I realise that, although I felt I was out there in the wild, wandering through a pristine natural world, that was an illusion. Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying. Many of the larger animals were already rare. A shifting baseline has distorted our perception of all life on Earth. We have forgotten that once there were temperate forests that would take days to traverse, herds of bison that would take four hours to pass, and flocks of birds so vast and dense that they darkened the skies. Those things were normal only a few lifetimes ago. Not any more. We have become accustomed to an impoverished planet. We have replaced the wild with the tame. We regard the Earth as our planet, run by humankind for humankind. There is little left for the rest of the living world. The truly wild world–that non-human world–has gone. We have overrun the Earth.

He watched men like David Attenborough watched animals.

And, if the prevailing theory is true, the Easter Islanders started to starve before the fall of their civilization. In other words, even after it had stopped providing for them, it retained its fatal proficiency at sustaining a fixed pattern of behaviour. And so it remained effective at preventing them from addressing the problem by the only means that could possibly have been effective: creative thought and innovation. Attenborough regards the culture as having been very valuable and its fall as a tragedy. Bronowski’s view was closer to mine, which is that since the culture never improved, its survival for many centuries was a tragedy, like that of all static societies.

We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas. Even the most substantial ocean creatures are often remarkably little known to us including the most mighty of them all, the great blue whale, a creature of such leviathan proportions that (to quote David Attenborough) its "tongue weighs as much as an elephant, its heart is the size of a car and some of its blood vessels are so wide that you could swim down them." It is the most gargantuan beast that Earth has yet produced, bigger even than the most cumbrous dinosaurs. Yet the lives of blue whales are largely a mystery to us. Much of the time we have no idea where they are-where they go to breed, for instance, or what routes they follow to get there. What little we know of them comes almost entirely from eavesdropping on their songs, but even these are a mystery. Blue whales will sometimes break off a song, then pick it up again at the same spot six months later. Sometimes they strike up with a new song, which no member can have heard before but which each already knows. How they do this is not remotely understood. And these are animals that must routinely come to the surface to breathe.

He is the consummate professional, but never pompous or arrogant, and always ready to oblige and assist the production team, and credit them for their efforts.

Sir David was born in London but grew up in Leicester,

In 1952 he joined the BBC.

His autobiography is Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster.

(Everyone, I guess, sees their position as the neutral one and everyone else's position as biassed. I wonder why 177 minutes of the Today programme is completely secular; you feel horribly excluded by 3 minutes of Thought for Today. I see a sinister anti-religious bias when David Attenborough goes through a whole series without ever once aying "On the other hand maybe God made it all"; you feel that 30 minutes of hymn singing on Sunday evening amounts to theocratic oppression.)

a bizarre footnote, in 2010 Julia Thomas’s skull was unearthed in the garden of the broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough. A team of builders discovered the skull when they were excavating foundations for an extension, at the spot where the Rising Sun once stood. In July 2011, the West London coroner Alison Thompson formally identified the skull as belonging to Julia Thomas and recorded a verdict of unlawful killing.

Si algo constituye una plaga, tal y como afirma el naturalista David Attenborough,186 o un cáncer, como señalaba el Club de Roma,187 quien lo erradique será un héroe, o un verdadero salvador planetario en este caso.

Sir David Attenborough shared his wisdom that “There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive”.

No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experiened”.

The chances of any individual animal leaving behind fossilised remains are infinitesimal. First, its dead body has to lie in a place where sediment accumulates. That is most commonly in a lake or sea. Bones lying on the surface of the land are much more likely to be destroyed than preserved. Next, the sediment has to cover the bones before they disappear, preferably even before they are disarticulated. After that, the mud-and the bones within it- has to be compressed and turned into stone by the great, infinitely slow, movements that distort and crumple the earth's crust. That has to happen without the total obliteration of any sign of the bones. And finally, those bones have to be located in the tiny proportion of rocks which happen to be sufficiently close to the surface for them to be discovered by a prospecting palaeontologist. Thus not only have the vast majority of individual animals disappeared without a trace but great numbers of species and families have doubtless existed of which we have no knowledge whatsoever.

Such an intermediate form between egg and adult that is capable of independent life is known as a larva. All insects except the most simple and primitive pass through such a stage of development during their lives and often exploit it by drawing upon two different food sources during the course of their lives, one as a larva and the other as an adult. Amphibians are the only group of backboned animals to have such a stage in their life history. Interestingly, the newly hatched larvae of salamanders are indistinguishable to the naked eye from the hatchlings of the Queensland lungfish.

The axolotl is remarkable because it becomes sexually mature while still retaining the external gills of its larval form. It seems, however, that this is due to nutritional problems. The change from larva to adult is triggered by hormones, including thyroxine produced by the thyroid gland. Conditions in this one lake, both chemical and physical, are such that this gland does not develop properly. But that can be corrected. If an axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) is kept in a tank and a little thyroxine added to its water, the animal loses its external gills, climbs out of water and assumes a terrestrial life.

Many amphibian eggs are black with the pigment melanin that protects their delicate cells from damage by ultra-violet light. Newt eggs, however, are white and lack pigment so they need protection of leaves.

Female caecilians, however have many different ways of dealing with their young. One Brazilian species feeds them with her own skin. The female lays her eggs in cluster and then protectively curls her long body around them. After they hatch, the young-at three day intervals-suddenly and simultaneously start to bite her flanks and tear off strips of skin. She lies there passively, allowing them to swarm all over her until she has been stripped of the entire outer layer of her body. The frenzy lasts for some seven minutes. Then the family rests for three days while the female grows another layer of skin-and another meal.

Caimans sometimes adopt a creche system. Several females will use the same nursery pool. As the young grow, mothers begin to leave until a single female is left guarding as many as a hundred youngsters in a single pool.

Anoles (species of Anolis), American members of the iguanian clan, reinforce their head-bobbing signal in a special way. Like all iguanians, they have a muscular tongue that forms a large fleshy lump in the floor of the mouth. This has an internal scaffolding, part-cartilage part-bone, that is known as the hyoid. Its main component is a substantial rod that helps to support the tongue and enables iguanians to project their tongue forwards and use it to pick up insects. The anoles, however, have a rather more elaborate hyoid. There is a second rod, hinged to the base of the main one, that extends downwards into the skin on the underside of the throat of the males. The anole can flick this down and forwards so pushing out a triangular-shaped flap of skin. In some species this is coloured a brilliant red, in others a pale yellow. It is so big that when it is extended, it projects well beyond its owner’s chin. The vivid flash this creates can be seen from many yards away as a stab of light in the gloom of the forest. Creep up towards a displaying male, holding a mirror in your hand, and as he catches sight of himself he will respond with repeated flicks of his throat flag. Persist and he may become so infuriated by this rival who does exactly what he does that he may eventually turn around and abruptly leap at the mirror in an all-out attack