Elizabeth Kolbert

Amphibians__he word comes from the Greek meaning __ouble life.

In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.

Ocean Acidification is sometimes referred to as Global Warming's Equally Evil Twin. The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes... No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good predictor. Ocean Acidification played a role in at least 2 of the Big Five Extinctions: the End-Permian and the End-Triassic. And quite possibly it was a major factor in a third, the End-Cretaceous. ...Why is ocean acidification so dangerous? The question is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Depending on how tightly organisms are able to regulate their internal chemistry, acidification may affect such basic processes as metabolism, enzyme activity, and protein function. Because it will change the makeup of microbial communities, it will alter the availability of key nutrients, like iron and nitrogen. For similar reasons, it will change the amount of light that passes through the water, and for somewhat different reasons, it will alter the way sound propagates. (In general, acidification is expected to make the seas noisier.) It seems likely to promote the growth of toxic algae. It will impact photosynthesis__any plant species are apt to benefit from elevated CO2 levels__nd it will alter the compounds formed by dissolved metals, in some cases in ways that could be poisonous.Of the myriad possible impacts, probably the most significant involves the group of creatures known as calcifiers. (The term calcifier applies to any organism that builds a shell or external skeleton or, in the case of plants, a kind of internal scaffolding out of the mineral calcium carbonate.)...Ocean acidification increases the cost of calcification by reducing the number of carbonate ions available to organisms that build shells or exoskeletons. Imagine trying to build a house while someone keeps stealing your bricks. The more acidified the water, the greater the energy that__ required to complete the necessary steps. At a certain point, the water becomes positively corrosive, and solid calcium carbonate begins to dissolve. This is why the limpets that wander too close to the vents at Castello Aragonese end up with holes in their shells.According to geologists who work in the area, the vents have been spewing carbon dioxide for at least several hundred years, maybe longer. Any mussel or barnacle or keel worm that can adapt to lower pH in a time frame of centuries presumably already would have done so. __ou give them generations on generations to survive in these conditions, and yet they__e not there,_ Hall-Spencer observed.

Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did.

Trees are obviously a lot less mobile than, say, trogons__ropical birds common in Manú__r even ticks. But in a cloud forest, trees structure the ecosystem, much as corals structure a reef. Certain types of insects depend on certain types of trees, and certain sorts if birds depend on those insects, and so on up the food chain. The reverse is also true: animals are critical to the survival of the forest. They are the pollinators and seed dispersers, and the birds prevent the insects from taking over. At the very least . . . global warming will restructure ecological communities. Different groups if trees will respond differently to warming, and so contemporary associations will break down. New ones will form. In this planet-wide restructuring, some species will thrive. . . . Others will fall behind and eventually drop out.

Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.

The 'incredible frog hotel'__eally a local bed and breakfast_...the frogs stay (in their tanks) in a block of rented rooms.

Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart__he mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.

Of the many species that have existed on earth--estimates run as high as fifty billion--more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.more than a rounding error.

His interest, after all, was not in the origin of species but in their demise.

According to Lamarck, there was a force__he __ower of life___hat pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.