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It wasn't a petty squabble. It was a big squabble, in which pettiness played no small part.
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David Quammen |
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Imagine a single survivor, a lonely fugitive at large on mainland Mauritius at the end of the seventeenth century. Imagine this fugitive as a female. She would have been bulky and flightless and befuddled--but resourceful enough to have escaped and endured when the other birds didn't. Or else she was lucky. Maybe she had spent all her years in the Bambous Mountains along the southeastern coast, where the various forms of human-brought menac..
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David Quammen |
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c1476a2
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The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast--above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill--has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now.
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David Quammen |
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Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. Description or law, it challenged the theory of special creation and bruited the idea of evolution in a tone of thunderous innuendo.
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David Quammen |
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118c912
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The term refers to cascading disruptions that can pass between trophic levels--that is, between different categories of interrelated organisms in the hierarchy of energy transfer within an ecosystem.
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David Quammen |
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d4961a3
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To study its effect on a living, struggling human body, he meant. To do that, you would need the right combination of hospital facilities, BSL-4 facilities, dedicated and expert professionals, and circumstances. You couldn't do it during the next outbreak at a mission clinic in an African village. You would need to bring Ebola virus into captivity--into a research situation, under highly controlled scrutiny--and not just in the form of froz..
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David Quammen |
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Humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health.
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David Quammen |
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cb7c2f7
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Habitat doesn't replicate itself. Places get crowded. Creatures go hungry. They struggle. The result is competition and deprivation and misery, winners and losers, unsuccessful efforts to breed and, for the less fortunate individuals, early death. Many are called, but few are chosen. The book that awakened Darwin to this reality was An Essay on the Principle of Population, by a severely logical clergyman and scholar named Thomas Malthus.
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David Quammen |
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23f3a28
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We know that ecological isolation--either by seawater or by other sorts of delimitation--correlates strongly with risk of extinction
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David Quammen |
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f95d097
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He succeeded in staying out of exactly and only those forms of postadolescent trouble that were not winked at, sating himself with those that were.
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David Quammen |
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not just Machupo but also Marburg (1967), Lassa (1969), Ebola (1976, with Karl Johnson again prominently involved), HIV-1 (inferred in 1981, first isolated in 1983), HIV-2 (1986), Sin Nombre (1993), Hendra (1994), avian flu (1997), Nipah (1998), West Nile (1999), SARS (2003), and the much feared but anticlimactic swine flu of 2009.
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David Quammen |
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aboard:
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David Quammen |
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8be733b
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Without explaining what's on my mind, I ask Nafus and Schreiner: Have they seen any recent invasions by exotic arthropods, or any dramatic population outbreaks among native ones? I inquire about arthropods rather than insects because it's a broader category, inclusive also of such charming non-insect invertebrates as ticks, centipedes, millipedes, and spiders. Asking a professional entomologist about arthropods (and not about, say, bugs) is..
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David Quammen |
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191d14c
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weighing only five grams (about the same as two dimes),
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David Quammen |
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Acarologists (tick biologists)
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David Quammen |
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981b7ba
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Viruses face four basic challenges: how to get from one host to another, how to penetrate a cell within that host, how to commandeer the cell's equipment and resources for producing multiple copies of itself, and how to get back out--out of the cell, out of the host, on to the next. A
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David Quammen |
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7df3790
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The protein wrap is known as a capsid. The
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David Quammen |
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3c0abfe
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Penicillin works by preventing bacteria from building their cell walls. So do its synthetic alternatives, such as amoxicillin. Tetracycline works by interfering with the internal metabolic processes by which bacteria manufacture new proteins for cell growth and replication.
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David Quammen |
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The basic point is so important I'll repeat it: RNA viruses mutate profligately.
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David Quammen |
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ideas--and where facts were scarce, directive questions. Other
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David Quammen |
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Most bacteriologists were trained as medical men--Burnet himself had been, before going into bacteriological research--and "their interest in general biological problems was very limited." They cared about curing and preventing diseases, which was well and good; less so about pondering infection as a biological phenomenon, a relationship between creatures, equal in fundamental importance to such other relationships as predation, competition..
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David Quammen |
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A plate of Ebola virions mixed with Hendra virions would resemble capellini in a light sauce of capers.
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David Quammen |
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equatorial Africa? Could it have arrived there in one soaring leap, leaving no traces in between? From southwestern Sudan to Manila is almost seven thousand miles as the bat flies. But no bat can fly that far without roosting. Are ebolaviruses more broadly distributed than we suspect? Should scientists start looking for them in India, Thailand, and Vietnam? Or did Reston virus get to the Philippines the same way Tai Forest virus got to Swit..
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David Quammen |
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59e2f5a
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the good news about Reston virus, derived both from the 1989 US scare and from retrospective research on Luzon, is that it doesn't seem to cause illness in humans, only in monkeys. The bad news is that no one understands why. Apart
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David Quammen |
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e783a05
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Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare.
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David Quammen |
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Herpes B is a very rare infection in humans but a nasty one, with a case fatality rate of almost 70 percent among those few dozen people infected during the twentieth century (before recent breakthroughs in antiviral pharmaceutics) and almost 50 percent even since then. When
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David Quammen |
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Britain's Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens had lately reclassified herpes B into biohazard level 4, placing it in the elite company of Ebola, Marburg, and the virus that causes Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. National
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David Quammen |
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9e72811
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Trophic cascades, as defined by Diamond in his "Rosetta Stone" paper, are the secondary effects that can ramify from level to level in consequence of a single extinction."
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David Quammen |
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6b2a4b2
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convincing biologic evidence exists for symptomatic chronic B. burgdorferi infection in patients after recommended treatment regimens for Lyme disease.
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David Quammen |
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No convincing biologic evidence exists for symptomatic chronic B. burgdorferi infection in patients after recommended treatment regimens for Lyme disease.
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David Quammen |
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433733b
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It worries the flu scientists because they know that H5N1 influenza is (1) extremely virulent in people, with a high lethality though a relatively low number of cases, and yet (2) poorly transmissible, so far, from human to human. It'll kill you if you catch it, very likely, but you're unlikely to catch it except
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David Quammen |
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RNA viruses because I already had that list in my mind: Hendra and Nipah, Ebola and Marburg, West Nile, Machupo, Junin, the influenzas, the hantas, dengue and yellow fever, rabies and its cousins, chikungunya, SARS-CoV, and Lassa, not to mention HIV-1 and HIV-2. All of them carry their genomes as RNA. The
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David Quammen |
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RNA viruses are limited to small genomes because their mutation rates are so high, and their mutation rates are so high because they're limited to small genomes. In fact, there's a fancy name for that bind: Eigen's paradox. Manfred Eigen is a German chemist, a Nobel winner, who has studied the chemical reactions that yield self-organization of longer molecules, a process that might lead to life. His paradox describes a size limit for such s..
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David Quammen |
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39cc310
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And hopefully nothing will happen." But of course, as she well knew, something always does happen. It's just a question of what and when."
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David Quammen |
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cd4b25e
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Among the most important things to remember about evolution--and about its primary mechanism, natural selection, as limned by Darwin and his successors--is that it doesn't have purposes. It only has results. To
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David Quammen |
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7b3be4b
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Saying no to the inevitable is one of the few precious ways our own species redeems itself from oblivion- or at least tries to.
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David Quammen |
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The order Chiroptera (the "hand-wing" creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat. Such"
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David Quammen |
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fb9e2cb
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SIR model, representing a flow of individuals, during the course of an outbreak, through those three classes I mentioned earlier: from susceptible (S) to infected (I) to recovered (R). Anderson
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David Quammen |
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2fa12dc
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know that walking into a small woodlot," he wrote, "is riskier than walking into a nearby large, extensive forest."
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David Quammen |
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7b76817
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Their result was a model-generated prediction: Given this rate of transmission, given that rate of recovery, given those unrelated mortalities, then . . . an intermediate grade of virulence should come to predominate. Son of a gun, it matched what had happened.
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David Quammen |
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One animal died and, after it tested positive for Reston virus, forty-nine others housed in the same room were "euthanized" as a precaution. (Most of those, tested posthumously, were negative.) Ten employees who had helped unload and handle the monkeys were also screened for infection, and they also tested negative, but none of them were euthanized."
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David Quammen |
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deed207
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Appearances have enormous importance, Mr. Kessler. The creation and maintenance of appearances. Appearances govern.
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David Quammen |
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Two men, on opposite sides of the world, had made the same great discovery at the same time.
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David Quammen |
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What are they called? Sprackles, shakums, edible sequins, glossy sugar deedeebobs, I don't know. Instead of sprinkling them on a cookie, I sprinkle them on Angel de la Guarda.
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David Quammen |