#insect

We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics. ↗

— Bill Vaughan

#gratitude #hope #how #insects #our

If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months. ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#disappear #few #humanity #insects #land

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers. ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#cemetery #dominant #insects #make #make up

If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It's not good to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one's ever heard about. ↗

— Thomas R. Cech

#better #ever #gene #good #had

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#allow #created #governed #insect #laws

Herein lies our problem. If we level that much land to grow rice and whatever, then no other animal could live there except for some insect pest species. Which is very unfortunate. ↗

— Steve Irwin

#could #except #grow #insect #land

We are not like the social insects. They have only the one way of doing things and they will do it forever, coded for that way. We are coded differently, not just for binary choices, go or no-go. We can go four ways at once, depending on how the air feels: go, no-go, but also maybe, plus what the hell let's give it a try. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#also #binary #choices #coded #depending

We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#along #around #back #bees #dancing

I mean that it is possible to be unselfish without a moral code, sophisticated without and education, and beautiful wearing a skeleton on the outside. ↗

— Marlene Zuk

#beauty

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products? ↗

— Jeremy Rifkin

#birds #come #contact #digest #happens