On the island of Guam, he has confronted a pestilential explosion of snakes and spiders. In Madagascar, he has considered the meaning of tenrecs, a group of strange, prickly mammals native to that island. But over the past eight years, David Quammen has followed its threads on a globe-circling journey of discovery. Until now, this scientific revolution has remained unknown to the general public. The new mode of thought focuses particularly on a single question: Why have island ecosystems always suffered such high rates of extinction? In our own age, with all the world's landscapes, from Tasmania to the Amazon to Yellowstone, now being carved into islandlike fragments by human activity, the implications of island biogeography are more urgent than ever.
Why do marsupials exist in Australia and South America, but not in Africa? Why do tigers exist in Asia, but not in New Guinea? Influenced by MacArthur and Wilson's book, an entire generation of ecologists has recognized that island biogeography -the study of the distribution of species on islands and islandlike patches of landscape - yields important insights into the origin and extinction of species everywhere. In a book titled The Theory of Island Biogeography, they presented a new view of a little-understood matter: the geographical patterns in which animal and plant species occur. Wilson triggered a far-reaching scientific revolution. Thirty years ago, two young biologists named Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Quammen’s wondrous peregrination of islands takes us on a journey of evolutions and extinctions in order to illustrate how like islands our continents have become.” Read more.The song of the dodo : island biogeography in an age of extinctions / David Quammen maps by Kris Ellingsen Book Bib ID Islands are where species most commonly go extinct. This is what happens on small islands in mid-ocean. Populations that – unlike birds or flying insects – are unable to move and mingle with other populations suffer from genetic impoverishment.
Species that exist in these little Noah’s arks are increasingly vulnerable to assault by pollution, climate change and predators. For the most part, nature now exists only in tiny pockets, oases in a biological desert, fraying at the edges. That’s what we’ve done to our ecosystems. Cut a beautiful, complex carpet into tiny squares, he says, and you get not tiny carpets, but a lot of useless scraps of material fraying at the edges. He likens an ecosystem to a Persian carpet.
“I don’t think anyone has described the fragmentation of nature in the modern world as brilliantly as Quammen. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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