On 3/25/07, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 3/24/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
"Endemic to X" means "native to
only X"...
<snip>
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).