Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Ashely Alker, MD

Quote by Ashely Alker, MD

“Ebola is an odd and terrifying disease, so its likely source is fitting: bats. Bats are believed to have transmitted the disease to mammals such as antelopes, chimps, and gorillas, and then the virus was spread to humans through contact with the aforementioned animals, including bats. Don't touch bats.”

Quote by Ashely Alker, MD

Book:99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them
Create image

Work

99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Ashely Alker, MD

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Ashely Alker, MD. more

You May Also Like

“Bats look and behave a whole lot differently than mice or foxes or elephants, but nobody would argue that they're not mammals. No, bats are just a weird type of mammal that evolved wings and developed the ability to fly. Birds are just a weird group of dinosaurs that did the same thing.”

ScienceEvolutionArgumentBatsBirdsDinosaursMammals
Book:The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
Create image

“She shook her head, and closed her eyes. I felt her weariness then, and with it, my own. I felt it dark and heavy upon me, darker and heavier than any drug they ever gave me - it seemed heavy as death. I looked at the bed. I have seemed to see our kisses there sometimes, I've seen them hanging in the curtains, like bats, ready to swoop. Now, I thought, I might jolt the post and they would only fall, and shatter, and turn to powder.”

DarkDrugHeavyEyesWearyBatsWearinessPowderKissesShatter
Book:Affinity
Create image

“She flies higher than she’s ever flown before, maybe she is trying to leave the earth. She isn’t sure, she isn’t thinking about it. She’s far in her mind, deep in her own thoughts, the air on her wings feels amazing, she is swimming, rolling through the air as if it’s water. She lifts her head as she flies and lets out a series of loud chirps. And that’s when she sees it. The largest bat ever. Flying faster than any hawk or eagle or owl, roaring like some sort of monster. She doesn’t know the human word ‘dragon’ otherwise she would call it that. There is no time to flee. No time to turn. No time to shriek, and no pain. It is like being thrown into the stars.”

Bats
Book:Lagoon
Create image

“Much has been written on the excellence of bats' navigation equipment. It is all false. Tropical bats spend their entire time flying into obstacles with a horrible thudding noise. They specialize in slamming into walls and falling, fluttering onto your face. As my own 'piece of equipment essential for the field' I would strongly recommend a tennis racket; it is devastatingly effective in clearing a room of bats.”

HumourBats
Book:The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut
Create image

“It does appear that some parts of our evolutionary process seem inevitable. It is striking that throughout evolutionary history, the eye evolved independently fifty to a hundred times. This is strong evidence for the fact that the different rolls of the dice that have occurred across different species seem to have produced species with eyes regardless of what is going on around them. Lots of other examples illustrate how some features, if they are advantageous, seem to rise to the top of the evolutionary swamp. This is illustrated every time you see the same feature appearing more than once in different parts of the animal kingdom. Dolphins and bats, for example, use echolocation, but they evolved this trait independently at very different points on the evolutionary tree.”

EyeProcessChanceHistoryEvolutionEvidenceSpeciesBatsFactDolphinsTopAnimal KingdomFeatureSwampTraitEvolutionaryRollsIndependentlyEvolvedEcholocationAdvantageousEvolutionary Tree
Book:The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science
Create image

“Vast areas of old forest have been cut, or chained down with bulldozers, to make way for cattle ranching and urban sprawl. People have planted orchards, established urban parks, landscaped their yards with blossoming trees, and created other unintended enticements amid the cities and suburbs. 'So bats have decided that, as their native habitat is disappearing, as climate is becoming more variable, and their food source is becoming less diverse, it's easier to live in an urban area.”

EnvironmentDiseaseEnvironmentalGlobal WarmingPandemicBatsApocalypseCityVirus
Book:Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
Create image