“Since we rarely see bats, it's easy to mistake them for ecological B-listers that dine on the nocturnal scraps that birds leave behind. It's actually the other way round: In some rainforests, bats devour twice as many insects as birds.”
Source: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
“There are more than 1,400 species of bats. All of them fly. Most of them echolocate.”
Source: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
“They're (Bats) found on every continent except Antarctica, and they account for one in every five mammal species.”
Source: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
“...Thousands of years ago, one particular lineage got a taste for humans, who had recently started living in densely populated settlements. Drawn to these sites, Aedes aegypti transformed into an urban animal that prefers towns over forests and... is tuned to the distinctive cues of our bodies above all else. This mosquito is now among the planet's most effective hunters of humans, and is extremely picky about anything else.”
Source: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
“Dogs are masters of smell, but note their large ears. Owls are masters of hearing, but note their large eyes.”
Source: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
“Stay away from the people who keep correcting you.”
“83 percent of the continental United States lies within a kilometer of a road.”
Source: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
“Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye,–however it may come, these minds will give it a habitation; it is something to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up the void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right; it is at once a staff and a baton.”
Source: The Mill on the Floss
“Simply to make the accusation is to prove it. To hear the allegation is to believe it. No motive for the perpetrator is necessary, no logic or rationale is required. Only a label is required. The label is the motive. The label is the evidence. The label is the logic. Why did Coleman Silk do this? Because he is an x, because he is a y, because he is both. First a racist and now a misogynist. It is too late in the century to call him a Communist, though that is the way it used to be done. A misogynistic act committed by a man who already proved himself capable of a vicious racist comment at the expense of a vulnerable student. That explains everything. That and the craziness.”
Source: The Human Stain
“Ignoring is that magical slight-of-hand where we make something disappear by simply ceasing to acknowledge its existence. But we must remember that slight-of-hand never results in dead-and-gone.”