Wild Ones 3 Butterflies Flashcards
Shifting baselines syndrome
The phrase describes an incremental lowering of standards that results with each new generation lacking knowledge of the historical, and presumably more natural, condition of the environment.
“Every generation of scientists accepts the oceans as he inherits them, Pauly argued. Overfishing may eat away at fish stocks, or even drive species extinct. But when the next generation of scientists start their careers, they don’t see the oceans as depleted; that depleted condition becomes their baseline, against which they’ll measure any subsequent losses in their lifetimes.” (128)
vertiginous
causing vertigo, especially by being extremely high or steep: vertiginous drops to the valleys below
“If the problem of shifting baselines was starting to feel unresolvable-like nothing could be objectively measured; like we were staring down into a vertiginous, infinitely receding series of subjective baselines, each invalidated by the one just behind it-then Donlan was ready to bring everyone back onto solid ground.”
ungulate
a hoofed mammal.
“The absences of that megafauna has had repercussions, too. For example, it allowed the animals those larger animals ate, like deer and other ungulates, to explode in number, setting in motion a suite of other disorderly consequences.” (130)
diminishing returns
(the law of) diminishing returns
used to refer to a point at which the level of profits or benefits gained is less than the amount of money or energy invested.
“He told me that any work to recover the Lange’s is decades beyond the point of diminishing returns, and even if it were possible, the agency’s strategies were, in his opinion, completely misguided.” (133)
terrapin
a small edible turtle with lozenge-shaped markings on its shell, found in coastal marshes of the eastern US.
“The article described how, recently, about a hundred small diamondback terrapins had made their annual migration, crossing the runways at New York’s Kennedy Airport.” (135)
passenger pigeon
an extinct long-tailed North American pigeon, noted for its long migrations in huge flocks. It was relentlessly hunted, the last individual dying in captivity in 1914.
“I read that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, passenger pigeons roosted in flocks of more than a hundred million birds.” (136)
roost
a place where birds regularly settle or congregate to rest at night, or where bats congregate to rest in the day.
“I read that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, passenger pigeons roosted in flocks of more than a hundred million birds.” (136)
idiosyncracies
a mode of behavior or way of thought peculiar to an individual: one of his little idiosyncrasies was always preferring to be in the car first.
” ‘Each individual buffalo went at it with the desperation of despair, plunging against or between locomotive and cars, just as its blind madness chanced to direct it…After having trains thrown off the track twice in one week, conductors learned to have a very decided respect for the idiosyncrasies of the buffalo.’ “
laureate
a person who is honored with an award for outstanding creative or intellectual achievement
“He was like America’s taxidermist laureate.” (139)
taxidermy
the art of preparing, stuffing, and mounting the skins of animals with lifelike effect.
alkaline
An alkaline substance is comprised of salts and other dissolved materials and is often found in desert soils and water; alkali can neutralize acids. Alkaline water is bitter, slippery, and caustic.
“…Hornaday arranged the choicest animals into a scene around an alkali watering hole.” (139)
perpetuity
the state or quality of lasting forever: he did not believe in the perpetuity of military rule.
“He envisioned it as a place where ordinary Americans could experience wildlife in perpetuity, no matter how many more extinctions occurred outside its gates.” (140)
egghead
a person who is highly academic or studious; an intellectual.
“Animals were big and awesome; cells were slow and boring. Animals were accessible to anyone; cells were for eggheads.” (140)
reliquary
a container for holy relics
“He’d started out wanting to save buffalo for future generations by stuffing them, then evolved to build a reliquary of living animals at a cit zoo.” (141)
Great Plains
a vast area of plains east of the Rocky Mountains in North America that extend from the valleys of the Mackenzie River in Canada to southern Texas.
“Now William Temple Hornaday, natily dressed in suit and top hat, was boldly crating up bison in New York City so that they could once again fill the Great Plains, shipping them on the same railroads that had helped obliterate the animals (142)
