Ecology, Biomes & Conservation Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the pattern of a population multiplying at an ever-faster rate because nothing is holding it back, tracing a J-shaped curve that climbs gently at first and then rockets upward, as bacteria do in fresh broth or an introduced pest does in a land with no natural enemies?

Question 2

What is the name for the particular kind of place where an organism lives, the surroundings that supply it with the food, water, shelter and space it needs, whether that is a coral reef, a rotting log, a hedgerow or the gut of a cow?

Question 3

What is the name for ground that stays frozen through two or more years in a row, underlying much of the Arctic and the far north, and holding a huge store of carbon in the form of frozen, undecayed plant remains that begins to rot and give off carbon dioxide and methane as it thaws?

Question 4

What is the name for the benefits that people receive free from working natural systems, such as the pollination of crops, the cleaning of water and air, protection from floods and storms, the formation of soil, the regulation of climate, and the stocking of fisheries?

Question 5

What is the name for a species whose influence on its community is out of all proportion to how common it is, so that removing it makes the whole system change character or fall apart, as when sea otters are lost from a kelp forest or the wolf from a valley?

Question 6

Which biome is defined by very low and unreliable rainfall, large swings between hot days and cold nights, bare ground between widely spaced specialised plants, and animals that shelter underground by day and come out to feed in the cool of the night?

Question 7

What is the name for a region that both holds an exceptional number of species found nowhere else and has already lost most of its natural vegetation, a combination that marks it out as an urgent priority; the idea was set out by Norman Myers, and the Western Ghats and the Himalaya are two of the roughly three dozen recognised?

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About Ecology, Biomes & Conservation

This quiz is about how living things fit together and how people try to keep the living world intact: the building blocks of ecology, the world's great biomes and the cycles of carbon, water and phosphorus, the way populations grow and communities recover from disturbance, and the threats, tools, laws and people of conservation. One hundred questions in five packs, each describing an idea, a biome, a process, a threat, a tool or a figure and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. It is a knowledge quiz, not a picture quiz.

The first pack is ecology's foundations: the ecosystem, habitat and niche, the food web and the feeding levels, producers and decomposers, the ten per cent rule, keystone species and trophic cascades, apex predators, competitive exclusion, mutualism and commensalism, succession and its pioneers, carrying capacity, the limiting factor, productivity and biodiversity.

The second pack is biomes and cycles: the tundra, the savanna, the temperate grassland, the desert, the temperate deciduous forest, the Mediterranean shrubland, wetlands, estuaries and coral reefs, then the carbon, water and phosphorus cycles, eutrophication, permafrost, the greenhouse effect, the idea of a biome, the ecotone, the rain shadow, the alpine zone and the deep sea.

The third pack is populations and disturbance: exponential and levelling-off growth, the predator-prey cycle, crowding-linked and crowding-blind checks, the fast-breeding and the slow-breeding life strategies, succession from bare rock and from disturbed ground, the climax community, disturbance itself, fire-dependent country, invasive species, island biogeography, fragmentation, the edge effect, corridors, mesopredator release, reintroduction and rewilding.

The fourth pack is conservation on the ground: the Red List and its categories, the wildlife-trade treaty, habitat loss and the illegal trade, the pangolin, the flagship, umbrella and indicator species, the national park, the biodiversity hotspot, and an Indian block, Project Tiger, Kaziranga, the one-horned rhino, the Asiatic lion, the vulture crisis and Salim Ali, plus captive breeding and ecosystem services.

The fifth pack is the big picture: the Gaia hypothesis, the tragedy of the commons, the ecological footprint, Silent Spring, the land ethic, E. O. Wilson, the Rio biodiversity treaty, the sixth mass extinction, defaunation, shifting baselines, ocean acidification, dead zones, microplastics, the ivory and whaling bans, assisted migration, de-extinction, the Anthropocene, the Living Planet Index and the 30 by 30 target.

The wrong answers are always other ideas, biomes, threats, tools or people of the same kind. About a quarter of the questions carry a neutral photograph of a forest path, a wetland, a meadow or someone using binoculars, chosen because it names no answer and so cannot point to any option. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.