Charles Sutherland Elton Quotes

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All cold-blooded animals and a large number of warmblooded ones spend an unexpectedly large proportion of their time doing nothing at all, or at any rate nothing in particular

Charles Sutherland Elton
The term "animal community" is really a very elastic one, since we can use it to describe on the one hand the fauna of the equatorial forest and on the other hand the fauna of a mouse's caecum.

Charles Sutherland Elton
The difference between the methods of a carnivore and a parasite is simply the difference between living upon capital and upon income; between the habits of the beaver, which cuts down a whole tree a hundred years old, and the bark-beetle, which levies a daily toll from the tissues of the tree; between the burglar and the blackmailer.

Charles Sutherland Elton
There is more ecology in the Old Testament or the plays of Shakespeare than in most of the zoological textbooks ever printed.

Charles Sutherland Elton
At a time when ecology and genetics are each racing swiftly towards one new concept after another, yet with little contact of thought between the two subjects, there may be some advantage in surveying, if only synoptically and in preliminary fashion, the largely uncharted territory between them.

Charles Sutherland Elton
It is usual to speak of an animal as living in a certain physical and chemical environment, but it should always be remembered that strictly speaking we cannot say exactly where the animal ends and the environment begins — unless it is dead, in which case it has ceased to be a proper animal at all...

Charles Sutherland Elton
The discoveries of Darwin, himself a magnificent field naturalist, had the remarkable effect of sending the whole zoological world flocking indoors, where they remained hard at work for fifty years or more, and whence they are now beginning to put forth cautious heads again into the open air.

Charles Sutherland Elton