Keystone Species Quotes

That all species are related in the flow of life and death is a keystone of evolutionary theory. The grandeur displayed in this view of life is ecological in character.

The beaver is one of several missing animals that have been described as keystone species. A keystone species is one that has a larger impact on its environment than its numbers alone would suggest. This impact creates the conditions which allow other species to live there.

Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon, growing maize, manioc, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex, Native Americans had been managing their environment for thousands of years.

If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it. Humans won't tolerate any other species - not even a superhuman one: they see them selves as the climax and culmination of the earthly entreprise, and they keep a vigorous check on any new intrusion in the cosmological process. Now there is no reason why this process should come to a halt with the human species, but, by universalizing itself (though only over a few thousand years) that species has more or less fixed it that an end be put to the occurrence of the world, assuming for itself all the possibilities of further evolution, reserving for itself a monopoly of natural and artificial species. This is not the ferocity of wild and predatory animal species, for these are part of cycles, and are located within constantly reversible hierarchies: neither their appearance nor their disappearance ever puts an end to the process. Only man invents a hierarchy against which there is no possible appeal, in which he is the keystone. This is a sort of ferocity raised to the second power, a disastrous pretension. The ferocity of man as a species is reflected in the ferocity of humanism as a way of thinking: his claim to universal transcendence and his intolerance of other types of thought is the very model of a superior racism.

Precisely when hominins learned to manipulate fire is unclear. But recent research suggests that fire, in the form of cooking, helps account for the leap into the genus Homo, who became physiologically dependent on cooked food. By boosting calories, and by detoxifying and softening food, controlled fire allowed us to exchange big guts for big brains. Experiments confirm that we cannot thrive or reproduce on raw foods alone: they simply cannot deliver the calories and they require more chewing, digestive juices, and intestinal machinery. With cooking that digestive process begins earlier. If the observations hold, they say that humans and fire have not simply co-existed but co-evolved. We are not only the keystone species for fire: fire is a keystone process for our existence.

Terrestrial mammals may be ecosystem-controlling “keystone species,” like elephants, or ecosystem engineers, like beavers. Well before humans, mammals dominated much of the land. They

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.

Modern, well-documented research demonstrates that apex predators such as wolves play keystone roles in keeping prey populations healthy by culling the weak and infirm. They also keep ungulate numbers in balance with habitat; wolf reintroduction into Yellowstone resulted in a stunning transformation of overbrowsed, depleted river and stream corridors, to the benefit of many species, from aspens and cottonwoods to beaver to songbirds to cutthroat trout. An

Recognizing the journeymen’s role as a "keystone species" helps to explain the severe disruptions caused by the disproportionate drawdown in their numbers triggered by the budget cutbacks

Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon, growing maize, manioc, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex, Native Americans had been managing their environment for thousands of years. As Cahokia shows, they made mistakes. But by and large they modified their landscapes in stable, supple, resilient ways.

spreads life around it in the desert’. Humboldt had discovered the idea of a keystone species, a species that is as essential for an ecosystem as a keystone is to an arch, almost 200 years before the concept was named. For Humboldt the Mauritia palm was the ‘tree of life’ – the perfect symbol of nature as a living organism.

Add up all those dependents, and you begin to comprehend why scientists consider beavers the ultimate keystone species. To architects, a keystone is the wedge-shaped block that forms the apex of a stone arch, the brick that holds the span in place. To ecologists, a keystone species is that rare organism that likewise supports an entire biological community. Salmon, whose decomposing carcasses sustain grizzly bears, eagles, and even trees, are one keystone species; elephants, who clear the savanna for grasses by uprooting trees and shrubs, are another. Pull the keystone out, and the arch—or the ecosystem—collapses.

Not only was the abundance of mycorrhizal fungi higher in organically managed fields but the fungal communities were also far more complex: Twenty-seven species of fungi were identified as highly connected, or “keystone species,” compared with none in the conventionally managed fields.

A keystone, that’s called, and without it everything falls, like a tower of blocks or a house of cards. It’s the same with keystone species— beavers, wolves, prairie dogs, bees, desert tortoises, sea otters— they are nature’s glue, holding habitats together.

Keystone species are those known to crucially affect the overall function of an ecosystem,