Ecology Trivia
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This ecology trivia quiz has 211 free questions with answers and covers the science of how organisms interact with each other and their environment: food chains and the ten-per-cent law, trophic levels and inverted pyramids, keystone species from Paine's starfish to sea otters, the Yellowstone wolves, ecological niches, succession on new volcanic islands, the three kinds of symbiosis, r/K selection, biomes and biodiversity hotspots, and the carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. It also asks about the people who built the field, from Haeckel and Humboldt to Tansley, Elton, Odum, Rachel Carson and MacArthur and Wilson, and about invaders like cane toads, zebra mussels and kudzu. It suits biology and environmental science students, teachers looking for a ready-made round, pub quiz hosts and anyone who likes knowing why the world is green. Easy questions cover terms every student meets; the hard ones ask who really coined 'ecosystem' and where a fig wasp gets in. Every answer has been checked against a reliable source, and each question shows its citation once you have answered.
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Q 01Which German scientist coined the term 'ecology' (Ökologie) in 1866?
Ernst Haeckel
Ernst Haeckel introduced 'Ökologie' in his 1866 Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, the same book in which he pushed Darwin's ideas onto German readers.
Q 02Which artistic movement drew on the sea-creature plates of Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), published from 1899?
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau: designers such as René Binet and Émile Gallé borrowed the curling shapes of its jellyfish and radiolarians, and Binet drew on the same zoologist's work for his gate to the 1900 Paris Exposition.
Q 03The word 'ecosystem' first appeared in print in 1935 in a publication by which British ecologist?
Arthur Tansley
Arthur Tansley used 'ecosystem' in his 1935 paper in the journal Ecology, wanting a word that stressed the exchange of materials between organisms and their physical surroundings.
Q 04Garrett Hardin's 1968 essay about herders overstocking a shared pasture gave environmental debate which phrase?
The tragedy of the commons
The tragedy of the commons: each herder gains by adding one more animal while the cost of overgrazing is shared by all, so, Hardin argued, freedom in a commons brings ruin to everyone.
Q 05Which American ecologist wrote the 1953 textbook Fundamentals of Ecology with his brother?
Eugene Odum
Eugene Odum wrote it with his younger brother Howard and built the whole book around the ecosystem, which carried that word out of the journals and into common use.
Q 06Whose 1927 book Animal Ecology set out food chains, ecological niches and the 'pyramid of numbers'?
Charles Elton
Charles Elton: such diagrams are still called Eltonian pyramids, and his 'food cycle' is what later textbooks renamed the food web.
Q 07Ecologists sort organisms into trophic levels, a term taken from the Greek trophē, meaning what?
Nourishment
Nourishment: a trophic level is a step in the food chain. Raymond Lindeman's 1942 paper setting the levels out was at first rejected by the journal Ecology as too theoretical.
Q 08Roughly what share of the chemical energy in its food does a consumer turn into its own tissue?
About 10%
About 10%: most of the rest is lost as heat, which limits how many levels an ecosystem can support and is why food chains run out after only a few links.
Q 09Which ecological pyramid can be inverted in a pond, where phytoplankton reproduce fast but live briefly?
Biomass
The pyramid of biomass: a small standing crop of fast-reproducing phytoplankton can weigh less than the zooplankton and fish that eat it, whereas energy pyramids are always upright.
Q 10Which zoologist introduced the keystone species concept in the 1960s after a starfish-removal experiment?
Robert Paine
Robert Paine coined 'keystone species' after he removed the starfish Pisaster from a stretch of Washington shore and watched mussels crowd out most other species.
Q 11The 1960s paper that coined 'keystone species' paired the California mussel with which predator as its main example?
Ochre starfish
Ochre starfish: Pisaster ochraceus eats the mussels that would otherwise take over the rock, which leaves room for the seaweeds, sponges and anemones it does not eat.
Q 12Sea otters protect kelp forests mainly by eating which grazers?
Sea urchins
Sea urchins: where fur hunters all but wiped the otters out, urchins multiplied unchecked and overgrazed the kelp forests.
Q 13The sea otter's fur, the densest of any animal, packs up to how many hairs per square centimetre?
150,000
150,000: that is about a million hairs per square inch, more than on a whole human head. With no blubber, the otter relies on that coat to keep warm.
Q 21The competitive exclusion principle is also known by what name?
Gause's law
Gause's law: the name honours a Soviet biologist whose 1930s laboratory cultures showed one species driving a rival extinct when both lived on the same food.
Q 22A classic 1930s laboratory test of competitive exclusion grew two species of which microorganism?
Paramecium
Paramecium: each species thrived alone, but grown together on the same food P. aurelia drove P. caudatum to extinction.
Q 23Henry Cowles's pioneering 1899 study of ecological succession was carried out on sand dunes beside which Great Lake?
Lake Michigan
Lake Michigan: Cowles, who learned Danish to read Eugen Warming's plant ecology in the original, worked on the Indiana Dunes, and his paper set off the campaign to preserve them.
Q 14In ideal conditions, giant kelp can lengthen by roughly how much in a single day?
About 50 cm
About 50 cm: published peaks run from 45 to 60 cm a day, among the fastest growth of any organism, so a kelp forest torn up by winter storms can grow back each spring.
Q 15Which animal makes up most of the winter prey of Yellowstone's wolves?
Elk
Elk: in the decades without wolves the herds grew until young aspen and cottonwood were badly overbrowsed, and since the 1995 reintroduction elk have again been the staple of the park's packs.
Q 16Who killed Yellowstone's last known wolves, two pups, in the 1920s?
Park rangers
Park rangers: wiping out wolves was then government policy, and it took a change of policy to bring wolves back to the park in 1995.
Q 17Which animal's colonies multiplied in Yellowstone as streamside willows recovered from the late 1990s?
Beaver
Beaver: willow is their winter food, so colonies spread as it came back; how much credit the returned wolves deserve is still argued.
Q 18The 1960 'green world hypothesis' says the planet stays green because which group keeps herbivores in check?
Predators
It flipped the prevailing bottom-up view of communities, and is often shortened to the HSS hypothesis.
Q 19Joseph Grinnell's 1917 paper, probably the first to use 'niche' in research, concerned which bird?
California thrasher
The California thrasher: Grinnell's 1917 paper in The Auk tied the bird to chaparral habitat, a habitat-based niche now contrasted with later functional and mathematical definitions.
Q 20G. Evelyn Hutchinson defined the niche as an 'n-dimensional' what?
Hypervolume
An n-dimensional hypervolume: giving each condition a species needs its own axis let Hutchinson blend the older habitat and feeding ideas of the niche into one that could be measured.
Q 24In succession theory, what is the supposedly stable community at the end of a sere called?
Climax
Climax: Frederic Clements held that each region's climate fixes one stable climax, an idea challenged by ecologists who saw a far greater role for local soils and chance.
Q 25Off which country does Surtsey, the volcanic island that rose from the sea in 1963, lie?
Iceland
Iceland: Surtsey was protected in 1965 while it was still erupting, so that scientists could watch plants and animals colonise brand-new land without outside interference.
Q 26Which cactus of the Sonoran Desert is called a keystone species because so many animals feed and nest in it?
Saguaro
Saguaro: woodpeckers and gilded flickers dig nest holes in its flesh, and when they move out, elf owls, purple martins and finches move in.
Q 27A remora riding a shark, eating scraps while the shark is unaffected, is a classic example of which interaction?
Commensalism
Commensalism leaves the host unchanged while the hanger-on often evolves big adaptations, like the remora's sucker disc.
Q 28When an interaction harms one species while the other is completely unaffected, it is called what?
Amensalism
Amensalism, as when a penicillium mould's secretions kill nearby bacteria at no cost to the mould; it sits beside competition, where both parties lose, in the grid of species interactions.
Q 29Cowbirds, whydahs and many cuckoos lay eggs in other birds' nests for the hosts to raise; what is this strategy called?
Brood parasitism
Brood parasitism goes as far as disguise: the common cuckoo's barred underparts make small birds treat it like a sparrowhawk, which buys the female time to lay.
Q 30In 1885 botanist Albert Frank argued that mycorrhizae on tree roots were doing what?
Feeding the tree
Feeding the tree: Frank proposed that the root partner draws nutrients from soil and humus and passes them to its host, which feeds it in return, a trade since confirmed.