“I’ve heard that some of the larger spiders hunt songbirds. I have no objection to that. The spiders belong here, too. Let nature do what it needs to do. We who are people know more than to guide ourselves by nature’s practices.”

— Robert Sheckley

The Tales of Zanthias (published in Weird Tales (July-August, 2003); reprinted in David G. Hartwell (ed.), Year’s Best Fantasy 4 (pp. 400-401))
Short fiction

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Robert Sheckley 114

American writer 1928–2005

Anne Bishop (1955) American fiction writer

Source: Queen of the Darkness

“Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The Internet is as natural as a spider's web. As Margulis and Sagan have written, we are ourselves technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as means of genetic survival: 'We are a part of an intricate network that comes from the original bacterial takeover of the Earth. Our powers and intelligence do not belong specifically to us but to all life.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Green Humanism (p. 16)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

“Nature's sturdiest buds and her best-fed butterflies belong to this sex; her female spiders are large enough to eat up a score of her little males; some of her mother-fishes might parody the nursery-song, "I have a little husband no bigger than my thumb."”

Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825–1921) American minister

September 1874, Popular Science Monthly Vol. 5, Article: The Alleged Antagonism Between Growth and Reproduction , p. 608
The Alleged Antagonism Between Growth and Reproduction (1874)