Quotes & Sayings About Predators And Prey

Stop your whining. If you are frightened, be silent. Whining is for prey. It attracts predators. And you are not prey. — Robin Hobb

What functions do dreams serve today? One view, published in a reputable scientific paper, holds that the function of dreams is to wake us up a little, every now and then, to see if anyone is about to eat us. But dreams occupy such a relatively small part of normal sleep that this explanation does not seem very compelling. Moreover, as we have seen, the evidence points just the other way: today it is the mammalian predators, not the mammalian prey, who characteristically have dream-filled sleep. — Carl Sagan

Bandit or demon, human or beast, none of it made any difference. The bandits had made this a situation of predators and prey. Only living mattered. Everything else was nothing more than an afterthought. — Drew Hayes

Predators and prey always coexist. That's why we have galleries as well as photographers. — Bill Jay

The arms race between [predators] and [prey] is asymmetric, in which success on either side is felt as failure by the other side, but the nature of the success and failure on the two sides is very different. The two sides are 'trying' to do very different things. [Predators] are trying to eat [prey]. [Prey] are not trying to eat [predators], they are trying to avoid being eaten by [predators].
From an evolutionary point of view asymmetric arms races are more [likely] to generate highly complex weapons systems. — Richard Dawkins

There's no such thing as good or bad dinosaurs. There are predators and prey. The T-Rex in 'Jurassic Park' took human lives and saved them. No one interpreted her as good or bad. — Colin Trevorrow

In short, conquest is in no sense a necessary sign of higher human development, though conquistadors have always thought otherwise. Any valid concept of organic development must use the primary terms of ecology-cooperation and symbiosis-as well as struggle and conflict, for even predators are part of a food chain, and do not 'conquer' their prey except to eat them. The idea of total conquest is an extrapolation from the existing power system: it indicates, not a desirable end, accomodation, but a pathological aberration, re-enforced by such rewards as this system bestows. As for the climactic notion that "the universe will be man's at last"-what is this but a paranoid fantasy, comparable to the claims of an asylum inmate who imagines that he is Emperor of the World? Such a claim is countless light-years away from reality. — Lewis Mumford

Why did this keep happening? Why her? Perhaps there was some pheromone certain people omitted, perceivable only on a wavelength unique to those individuals who preyed on them. — Nenia Campbell

We wait to be rescued, but for whatever reason, no one comes. We figure that if no one protects us then we must not be worth protecting so we become prey and are easily picked off. Our wounded, kicked-puppy gazes attract sly predators and we sell ourselves for clearance sale prices, mistaking screwing for caring. — Laura Wiess

The human race has the capacity to render itself extinct unless alternatives are found to the patterns of intraspecific warfare that have dominated civilized history. Ours has long been a predatory species. Living, for humans, depends upon the ability to kill as clearly as it does for lions or wolves. But lions and wolves, like almost all predatory species, normally limit their killing to prey animals, and they are equipped with elaborate ritual precautions to prevent the destruction of their own kind. Humans appear to be unique among predators in their enthusiasm to destroy members of their own species. Perhaps this unusual behavior can be attributed to some genetic deficiency which may lead humans ultimately to join the rest of nature's failures in the biological graveyard of extinction. Or perhaps our willingness to kill ourselves, like so many of our other problems, is something we have devised by misusing our enlarged brains. — Joseph W. Meeker

Humans became easy prey when they moved from the forest to the savanna, which deprived them of the option of climbing trees to flee predators. This shift made it necessary for the men to actively protect the women and their babies. Only as a result of this protection were women able to give birth in shorter intervals, perhaps once every two or three years. This meant that they could produce offspring about twice as frequently as apes. I would be willing to bet that this rapid reproduction is one of the reasons why we dominate the world today, and not the apes. — Frans De Waal

The world consisted of predators and prey. You were either hunting or running. — Charlene Weir

This is the "burglar-alarm" theory of bioluminescence: by turning on its lights, an animal may create enough of a scene to draw the attention of its predator's predator, and thereby perhaps save itself. The corollary of the burglar-alarm theory is the minefield theory. It says the reason so many animals tend to hang motionless in the deep, even fish, is to avoid setting off light explosions that would expose them to their enemies - their predators or their prey. Life in the midwater, in this view, is a tense affair (though the denizens do not know it) in which everyone is waiting stealthily in the dark, moving slowly if at all, watching and waiting for someone to turn on a light and for something to happen. — Robert Kunzig

Australian Aborigines say that the big stories - the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life - are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush. — Robert Moss

Then again, that's how the most successful predators work, she thinks ruefully. We stumble into their traps and do their work for them while we're busy getting on with the business of living. — Kimberly Morgan

The predators may respond to the defensive reprisals of their prey as if they were the ones under attack, and experience a moralized wrath and a thirst for revenge. Thanks to the Moralization Gap, they will minimize their own first strike as necessary and trivial while magnifying the reprisal as unprovoked and devastating. Each side will count the wrongs differently - the perpetrator tallying an even number of strikes and the victim an odd number - and the difference in arithmetic can stoke a spiral of revenge, — Steven Pinker

In a fascinating study, Barrett (1999) demonstrated that children as young as three
years of age have a sophisticated cognitive understanding of predator-prey encounters. Children from both an industrialized culture and a traditional hunter-horticulturalist culture were
able to spontaneously describe the flow of events in a predator-prey encounter in an ecologically accurate way. Moreover, they understood that after a lion kills a prey, the prey is no longer alive, can no longer eat, and can no longer run and that the dead state is permanent.
This sophisticated understanding of death from encounters with predators appears to be developed by age three to four. — David M. Buss

I was peace pipes and treaties. My style was to talk and duck. It was an animal tactic, playing dead in hopes that the predators would move to an actual fight. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Our consciousness is also raised by the cruelty and wastefulness of natural selection. Predators seem beautifully 'designed' to catch prey animals, while the prey animals seem equally beautifully 'designed' to escape them. Whose side is God on? — Richard Dawkins

Horses are prey animals, and most of the other animals that I've shot are predators. If you act mellow with predators, they know that they can kill you, so they are cool, but if you work with prey, they think that you're going to kill them at any moment. — Jill Greenberg

However, in the virtual world of social networks, we get attracted to identities that are virtual. We don't know who is behind them and what their intentions are. Sometimes, they are just predators looking for easy prey. And they are very good at what they do. — Stevan V. Nikolic

As in the wild there were predators and prey, so, too, did they exist among men in towns and cities. The hardworking peasants were the grazers, and the thieves were the starving coyotes. — Kel Kade

Octopus can fish for prey while deciding what color and pattern to turn, what shape to make their bodies, be on alert for predators and aware how far away their dens are. — Sy Montgomery

Perhaps loneliness - it is that loneliest time of the night, the predawn darkness when the worst dreams come, the sunrise seems far off, and the creatures that inhabit both the real world and the darker edges of the unconscious prowl with the impunity of predators who know that their prey is helpless and alone. — Don Winslow

Taking things personally makes you easy prey for these predators, the black magicians. They can hook you easily with one little opinion and feed you whatever poison they want, and because you take it personally, you eat it up. You eat all their emotional garbage, and now it becomes your garbage. But if you do not take it personally, you are immune in the middle of hell. Immunity to poison in the middle of hell is the gift of this agreement. — Miguel Ruiz

There will always be victims, Anita. Predators and prey, it is the way of the world. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Once, there were no predators, no prey. Only harmony. There were no quakes, no storms, everything in balance. In the beginning, time was all at once and forever - no past, present, and future, no death. We broke it all. — Dean Koontz

Predators do not take orders from their prey. — Matshona Dhliwayo

She is still forming her conclusions but, above all, is convinced that their actions are borne of instinct: fixed patterns that take them to their source of food, to their safe havens, to their mates, and, ultimately, to their death, since their predators learn these patterns as surely as if they, too, had read Maud's book. — Emmanuelle De Maupassant

There was something delightfully intimate about the relationship between predator and prey. — Nenia Campbell

Let me guess. You think we're going to live happily ever after, like some stupid fairy tale?"
"Why not?" His stare dared me to laugh or, worse, to argue.
"Because the whole thing is ridiculous," I said. I despised the bitterness in my own voice. I sounded so damaged. Good. If he thought I was his soul mate for some mysterious reason he wouldn't let on, let him see the worst of me.
"It's not ridiculous to me. Perhaps that's the difference between predators and prey, love. I'll never stop hunting. But I expect that one day, you'll stop running."
"Because I want to die?"
"Because you want to live. — Delilah S. Dawson

Surviving in business is like surviving in the jungle;
you must look for prey while on the lookout for predators. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Australian Aboriginees say that the big stories - the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life - are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting prey in the bush. — Robert Moss

Remove the predators, and the whole ecosystem begins to crash like a house of cards. As the sharks disappear, the predator-prey balance dramatically shifts, and the health of our oceans declines. — Brian Skerry

It's natural. Nature is dark and light, birth and death. Everything and its opposite. And in nature there are predators and prey. The hunters and the hunted. The heartbreakers and the heartbroken. The beautiful thing is that Nature lets us choose which we want to be, most people never make the choice though because they don't even know they have it. — Lynn Weingarten

No, child," Nona said. "We were victims of the faeries' pride and greed."
"Victims? Sorry, but most of you don't seem very victimish to me. What about hags, and fossegrims, and redcaps, and all the other sharp-toothed nasties" - I looked pointedly at the dragon - "in your group? I don't feel very bad for anything that's spent all those centuries preying on innocent people."
"It makes sense," Arianna said, her voice soft but thoughtful.
"What?"
"When you introduce an alien species into a new environment, it has to adapt or die out. And usually the way it adapts it by preying on the native species. Look at the dodo birds. They were fine until people came to their island with cats and dogs and pigs, then they became prey."
"You do realize you just compared our entire race to dodo birds."
She shrugged. "If they were never meant to be here in the first place, it's not their fault they had to become predators."
"Thank you, Animal Planet. — Kiersten White

Our earliest ancestors were descended from primates who thrived for millions of years in a treetop environment, and who in the process had evolved one of the most remarkable visual systems in nature. To move quickly and efficiently in such a world, they developed extremely sophisticated eye and muscle coordination. Their eyes slowly evolved into a full-frontal position on the face, giving them binocular, stereoscopic vision. This system provides the brain a highly accurate three-dimensional and detailed perspective, but is rather narrow. Animals that possess such vision - as opposed to eyes on the side or half side - are generally efficient predators like owls or cats. They use this powerful sight to home in on prey in the distance. Tree-living primates evolved this vision for a different purpose - to navigate branches, and to spot fruits, berries, and insects with greater effectiveness. They also evolved elaborate color vision. — Robert Greene

As zookeepers, the Zabinskis understood both vigilance and predators; in a swamp of vipers, one planned every footstep. Shaped by the gravity of wartime, it wasn't always clear who or what could be considered outside or inside, loyal or turncoat, predator or prey. — Diane Ackerman

Our retinas and brains have been wired by a hundred million years of evolution to find outlines in a visually complex landscape. This helps us to recognize prey and predators. — Seth Shostak

When it comes to death, nature is much more cruel to predators than predators are to their own prey — Elizabeth Lowell

How can you stand to do it? The poor little mouse!"
Grover shrugged. "It's nature," he said. "Nature likes the snake just as much as the mouse. — Jeanne DuPrau

As for she's concerned the world has two king of people in it: predators and prey. — Claudia Gray

I think people are frustrated in this society, where predators prey upon normal, law-abiding citizens, and you never see justice in the courtroom. In my films, the predators don't get away with it. — Steven Seagal

The animals who play with the most abandon are the predators."

"But surely prey are almost never safe enough to play. — Brenda Cooper