On 3/25/07, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/24/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
"Endemic to X" means "native to only X"...
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And here I always figured that endemic meant a disease that affected a stable number of people in a given group, like "The common cold is endemic to the United Kingdom". I guess that's not all :)
Tell me, if the number of birds are increasing are they "epidemic to Chicago"?
--Oskar
In the biology of species distributions "endemic" means native to an area and only that area. Of course, the meaningfulness of the term varies with how the person defines the term. "Endemic to North America" isn't nearly as meaningful as "endemic to a single stream in Tennessee".
Obviously, in talking about diseases, "endemic" has a different meaning. The term "epidemic to" isn't used for species distributions, although the same sort of modelling tools can be used for the spread of diseases and the spread of non-native species (which are often called "exotic" species, just to confuse ordinary people).