Nature & Animals Quote by Robert T. Bakker

A scientist’s warning masquerading as a simple ecology lesson, this line uses a tabloid-sharp example (elephants making each other sick) to smuggle in a bigger argument about invasives: nature has borders, and crossing them has consequences. Bakker’s intent is less to sensationalize elephants than to compress a dense concept - coevolutionary mismatch - into an image anyone can hold. Two animals that look “close enough” to share a category still carry different parasites, immune histories, and microbial passengers. Put them together and the hidden baggage becomes the story.

The subtext is a rebuke to a familiar human instinct: treating ecosystems like interchangeable backdrops. “Introduced to a habitat” sounds clinical, almost bureaucratic, as if relocation were a neutral administrative act. Bakker snaps that illusion. He frames novelty itself as risk, not because the foreign is morally tainted, but because ecological relationships are negotiated over time, and sudden arrivals skip the negotiation. Disease becomes the most legible symptom of that skipped process.

Context matters: Bakker has spent a career thinking in deep time, where migration, isolation, and mass turnover reshape life. That long view makes him impatient with short-term “it’ll probably be fine” assumptions in conservation and wildlife management. Still, the quote’s bluntness - “the biggest danger” - is doing rhetorical work. It’s a provocation meant to cut through complacency, even if the absolutism invites pushback from ecologists who’d rank habitat loss and climate change as equal or greater threats. The punch is the same: biodiversity doesn’t just die from malice; it dies from casual mixing.