Biogeography Quotes

“As our ancestral populations spread across the globe, they encountered the same environments and selective forces that shaped the phenotypes of other populations endemic to these regions. The imprint of these regional selective forces is still evidenced by genetically determined differences in the characteristics of indigenous populations of humans, who often exhibit the same ecogeographic patterns described earlier for other native wildlife.
In comparison to populations endemic to tropical regions of the continents, human populations native to lands in the higher latitudes tend to be larger and have relatively shorter limbs—following Bergmann’s and Allen’s rules, respectively. Our indigenous populations also exhibit latitudinal variation in skin color reminiscent of Gloger’s rule: darker skin (greater melanism) in the tropics, protecting native humans from the potentially destructive effects of intense solar radiation; lighter skin in high latitude populations of our species promoting absorption of the limited sunlight to levels sufficient to stimulate the production and storage of vital nutrients in the skin.
On islands, the body size of primates (including insular populations of hominids) generally follows the island rule—exhibiting a graded trend toward more pronounced dwarfism in the larger species. The hominid of Flores Island (the “hobbit”) was only one-third to one-half the mass of its ancestor (most likely, Homo erectus). The island peoples of Indonesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and the Philippines also tend to be relatively small in stature, again consistent with the island rule.”
― Mark V Lomolino, Biogeography: A Very Short Introduction

“Throughout the over 200 years of the field of biogeography, its researchers have discovered some strikingly general patterns in biological diversity, and have advanced an equally intriguing set of explanations for the forces driving those patterns. Despite the many levels, qualitative features, and potential quantitative means of measuring biological diversity, the overwhelming majority of these studies have focused on just one or two relatively simple, but intuitively valuable measures—species richness and endemicity. Species richness is a simple count of the number of species in a particular area of interest (e.g. the number of fish in a pond, lake, or ocean basin). It is a direct, albeit simplistic expression of our innate value for the more complex. But our instinctive valuation of diversity is a bit more ecologically sophisticated than this, as it is also influenced by our apparently innate attraction to the rarest, most precious “gems” of the natural world.
A simple thought experiment should bear this out: given two assemblages with the same species richness—one comprising species common to most other ecosystems, and the other solely comprising endemics (so rare that they occur nowhere else), nearly all of us would be drawn to the latter assemblage because it has high endemicity. Beyond this instinctive attraction to the most rare, there clearly is a more pragmatic reason for valuing endemic species over the more broadly distributed (cosmopolitan) ones. If an endemic is lost from its assemblage, it disappears globally and the legacy of many thousands of generations of natural selection are irrevocably lost as well.”
― Mark V Lomolino, Biogeography: A Very Short Introduction

“One final note on the biogeographic divisions of the world. The very feature that stunned Buffon and his contemporaries, and eventually led to the revolutionary insights that would define the field of biogeography—the evolutionary distinctiveness of different regions—is now waning in the face of the geographic and ecological advance of one species: our own. Few taxa and regions across the globe have escaped the biotic homogenization caused by humanity. Regional biotas are becoming increasingly similar as a result of two pervasive, anthropogenic activities—extinctions of endemic species and species introductions. In fact, these two homogenizing effects of humanity are interrelated, with species introductions being one of the major causes of extinctions of endemic species.
Recall Gertrude Stein’s lament over the loss in distinctiveness of place—that “there is no there, there.” Tragically, this is becoming the sobering reality for the increasingly homogenized biosphere. While we may not be suffering from the muted, “ Silent Spring ” that Rachel Carson warned us about in 1962, the monotonous cacophony of coquís (frogs native to Puerto Rico) and cicada in exotic lands as isolated as Hawaii now drown out the euphonious, more subtle calls of honeycreepers and other birds native to the islands.”
― Mark V Lomolino, Biogeography: A Very Short Introduction

“The more recent, historic waves of extinctions of megafauna and other ecologically naive wildlife on oceanic islands followed the tract of colonizations by Pacific Islanders—ultimately exterminating at least seventeen of Madagascar’s largest lemurs and all of the ten or so species of New Zealand’s giant flightless birds—the moas. The saga of anthropogenic extinctions was repeated countless times across the marine realm as hundreds, and possibly thousands of species of flightless birds and other insular endemics suffered extinctions at the hands, teeth, and claws of our colonizing populations and the legion of rats, mice, cats, weasels, goats, and other species we introduced to even the most remote islands. Not only did we severely reduce the distinctiveness of oceanic islands by driving thousands of endemic species to extinction, but we compounded this by introducing a redundant suite of commensal species to these islands. The result was a global-scale homogenization of nature; a dissolution of biogeography’s most fundamental pattern, Buffon’s Law—the biological distinctiveness of place.”
― Mark V Lomolino, Biogeography: A Very Short Introduction