“You can’t drive a boat up to a narwhal – they would never let you. You need to sneak up on them.”
Kristin Laidre of the University of Washington, Seattle, on attaching electronic tags to narwhals and using them to monitor ocean temperatures in Baffin Bay as the whales dive down more than a mile below the surface (San Francisco Chronicle, 29 April)
“Denying it to people with chronic pain who really need it, out of concern that [some] will abuse it – that’s a terrible public-health decision.”
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Russ Portenoy of Beth Israel Medical Center, New York, on growing concerns over the misuse of the narcotic “lollipop” Actiq (Newsweek, 7 May)
“They’re killing these goats from helicopters and leaving them to die when I’m trying to feed my children.”
Eladio Peñafiel, a resident of the Galapagos islands, on the tension between the poor who hunt goats for food and park rangers who are killing the invasive non-native animals to protect the fragile ecosystem of the archipelago (The New York Times, 1 May)
“Parents who make up bizarre names for their children are ignorant, arrogant or just foolish.”
Psychologist Albert Mehrabian of the University of California, Los Angeles, on his study looking at how people reacted to names. Traditional names aroused positive feelings, but alternative names did badly (The Guardian, London, 29 April)
“We realised if we kept digging the half-pipes, the glacier might be gone in 10 rather than 20 years.”
Frank Huber, manager of skiing operations at the Zugspitze peak in Germany, on why they stopped gouging half-pipes for snowboarders into the Zugspitze glacier, which is disappearing at an alarming rate (CNN.com, 30 April)