19 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
19 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
# The Sixth Extinction
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## Metadata
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- Author: [[Elizabeth Kolbert]]
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- Full Title: The Sixth Extinction
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- Category: #books
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## Highlights
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- Although a land animal, our species—ever inventive—crosses (Location 57)
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- zeteki. Golden frogs have a distinctive, ambling gait (Location 141)
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- “Corals build the architecture of the ecosystem,” Caldeira told me. “So it’s pretty clear if they go, the whole ecosystem goes.” One of the Israeli scientists, Jack Silverman, put it to me this way: “If you don’t have a building, where are the tenants going to go?” (Location 1932)
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- Ocean acidification is, of course, not the only threat reefs are under. Indeed, in some parts of the world, reefs probably will not last long enough for ocean acidification to finish them off. The roster of perils includes, but is not limited to: overfishing, which promotes the growth of algae that compete with corals; agricultural runoff, which also encourages algae growth; deforestation, which leads to siltation and reduces water clarity; and dynamite fishing, whose destructive potential would seem to be self-explanatory. All of these stresses make corals susceptible to pathogens. (Location 1947)
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- “This is a qualitatively different set of stresses that we are putting on species,” Silman told me. “In other kinds of human disturbances there were always spatial refuges. Climate affects everything.” Like ocean acidification, it is a global phenomenon, or, to borrow from Cuvier, a “revolution on the surface of the earth.” (Location 2354)
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- “If evolution works the way it usually does,” Silman said, “then the extinction scenario—we don’t call it extinction, we talk about it as ‘biotic attrition,’ a nice euphemism—well, it starts to look apocalyptic.” (Location 2386)
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- Using the species-area relationship, S = cAz, and setting the value of z at .25, we can calculate that losing one percent of the original area implies the loss of roughly a quarter of a percent of the original species. If we assume, very conservatively, that there are two million species in the tropical rainforests, this means that something like five thousand species are being lost each year. This comes to roughly fourteen species a day, or one every hundred minutes. (Location 2568)
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- altruistic. Time and time again, people have demonstrated (Location 3598)
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