In his book _The Diversity of Life_ Edward O. Wilson writes:

"Perch like notothenioid fishes swim there [shallow bays of Antarctica] in temperatures just above the freezing point of salt water but cold enough to turn ordinary blood to ice, because they are able to generate glycopeptides in their tissues as antifreeze and thrive where other fish cannot go."

 He also writes: 


"The spider stands on the edge of a leaf or some other exposed spot and lets out a thread of silk from the spinnerets at the posterior tip of its abdomen. As the strand grows it catches an air current and stretches downwind like the string of a kite. The spider spins more and more of the silk until the thread exerts a strong pull on its body. Then it releases its grip on the surface and soars upward. Not just pinhead-sized babies but large spiders can occasionally reach thousands of meters of altitude and travel hundreds of kilometers before settling to the ground to start a new life." 

By this method and variations of it, insects have repopulated Krakatua, a volcanic island the size of Manhattan located between Sumatra and Java, after a massive eruption on the morning of August 27, 1883, virtually extinguished every life form the island had sustained.


Also:

" 'Human hunters help no species.' That is a general truth and the key to the whole melancholy situation. As the human wave rolled over the last virgin lands like a smothering blanket, Paleo-Indians throughout America, Polynesians across the Pacific, Indonesians into Madagascar, Dutch sailors ashore on Mauritius (to meet and extirpate the dodo), they were constrained neither by knowledge of endemicity nor any ethic of conservation. For them the world must have seemed to stretch forever beyond the horizon. If fruit pigeons and giant tortoises disappear from this island, they will surely be found on the next one. What counts is food today, a healthy family, and tribute for the chief, victory celebrations, rites of passage, feasts. As the Mexican truck driver said who shot one of the last two imperial woodpeckers, largest of all the world's woodpeckers, 'It was a great piece of meat.'"

And more:

"It is fashionable in some quarters to wave aside the small and obscure, the bugs and weeds, forgetting that an obscure moth from Latin America saved Australia's pastureland from overgrowth by cactus, that the rosy periwinkle provided the cure for Hodgkin's disease and childhood lymphocytic leukemia, that the bark of the Pacific yew offers hope for victims of ovarian and breast cancer, that a chemical from the saliva of leeches dissolves blood clots during surgery and so on down a roster already grown long and illustrious despite the limited research addressed to it."