MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 58 of 100

Correct — option (2), Ernst Heinrich Haeckel. The word was coined in 1866 by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, who built it, as he built several of his terms, out of Greek: oikos, a house or dwelling place, and logos, the study of — so ecology is literally the study of organisms in their household, the place where they live and the conditions they live among. Haeckel introduced it in his 'Generelle Morphologie der Organismen' as the name for the science of the relations of an organism to its surrounding environment, at a time when no such science had a name and Darwin's 'Origin of Species', published seven years earlier, had made the relations between organisms and their conditions the central question of biology. Haeckel was a prolific coiner of scientific vocabulary and several of his other inventions are examined in their own right — phylum, phylogeny and protista are all his — and he is remembered too for the recapitulation theory summarised in the slogan that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and for the beautifully drawn plates of 'Kunstformen der Natur'. The other three names in the option set are all genuine and important figures in ecology, which is what makes the question a real test rather than a giveaway; each of them, though, is attached to a different term or a different contribution. The one most easily confused with Haeckel is A. G. Tansley, because the term he coined — ecosystem, in 1935 — is the word a candidate meets first in any modern textbook, and it is easy to slide from 'the man who named the ecosystem' to 'the man who named ecology'. They are two different men, two different words and sixty-nine years apart. So the coining of 'ecology' belongs to Haeckel in 1866, which is option (2).

• (1)Charles Krebs — Charles J. Krebs, born in 1936, is a Canadian population ecologist and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, and he belongs to a period more than a century after the word 'ecology' was coined, so he cannot have coined it. His name is on this list because his textbook 'Ecology: The Experimental Analysis of Distribution and Abundance' is among the most widely used in the subject, so students meet his name on a cover before they meet it in a history. His own contributions are experimental rather than terminological: the fence-effect experiment of 1965, in which an enclosed vole population multiplied several times over, and two decades of work in the Yukon on the ten-year snowshoe hare cycle, which showed that predation accounted for the great majority of hare deaths. He received the Ecological Society of America's Eminent Ecologist Award in 2002. Recognising a name from a syllabus is not the same as placing it in time, and a coining question is always a question about when.
• (3)A.G. Tansley — This is the option that catches the candidate who knows the most, and it is worth pausing over. Sir Arthur George Tansley coined the term ECOSYSTEM in 1935 — 'These ecosystems, as we may call them, are of the most various kinds and sizes' — giving ecology its central unit of study, the community of organisms together with the physical environment they interact with, treated as one system through which energy flows and matter cycles. He was a British botanist, a founder of the British Ecological Society and the first chairman of the Nature Conservancy in Britain. But 1935 is sixty-nine years after Haeckel named the discipline itself, and the two coinings are distinct events belonging to two different men. The safe way to hold this pair is as a matched line: Haeckel, 1866, 'ecology'; Tansley, 1935, 'ecosystem'. Examiners set them against each other precisely because a candidate who holds only one of the two names has an even chance of attaching it to the wrong word.
• (4)Victor Shelford — Victor Ernest Shelford, who lived from 1877 to 1968, was an American zoologist and one of the founders of animal ecology, and he is remembered for the law of tolerance that carries his name — the principle that the presence and abundance of a species are limited by the range it can tolerate for each environmental factor, so that both too little and too much of a factor exclude it. He was the first president of the Ecological Society of America in 1915, wrote 'Animal Communities in Temperate America' in 1913 and 'The Ecology of North America' in 1963, worked on the concept of the biome, and founded the organisation that became The Nature Conservancy. All of that makes him a central figure in the subject and none of it makes him the author of its name, which was already sixty years old when he began publishing. Like Krebs, he is offered here because his name is genuinely familiar from the syllabus, and familiarity is what a coining question is designed to test against chronology.

Ecology is the study of the interactions between organisms and their environment, including the interactions of organisms with one another, and it is conventionally organised by level: the individual organism, the population, the community, the ecosystem, the biome and the biosphere. Its vocabulary was assembled over about a century and each major term has a name and a date attached, which is why questions of this kind are possible. Ernst Haeckel named the discipline in 1866, out of the Greek oikos and logos, shortly after Darwin had made the relation between organisms and their conditions the central problem of biology. A. G. Tansley named its central unit, the ecosystem, in 1935, insisting that the organisms and their physical surroundings had to be treated as one system rather than as a community set against a backdrop. Victor Shelford's law of tolerance, following Liebig's earlier law of the minimum, established that a species is limited by the ranges it can bear of each environmental factor, too much being as excluding as too little. Later workers gave the field its quantitative core — Charles Elton the food chain, the ecological niche and the pyramid of numbers; Raymond Lindeman the flow of energy through trophic levels and the ten per cent rule; Eugene Odum the textbook synthesis of ecosystem ecology. The reason MPSC and other commissions ask who coined what is that these names double as an index to the ideas: a candidate who can attach Haeckel to ecology, Tansley to the ecosystem, Shelford to tolerance and Elton to the food chain has, in effect, listed the field's four foundational concepts.

Environment and ecology is a growing section in MPSC papers, and 'who coined the term' is one of its most reliable question shapes because the answer is a matter of documented record and admits no argument. The examiner's usual construction is the one used here: put the correct coiner among three other genuine and well-known figures from the same discipline, so that mere recognition of a name is no help at all and only the pairing of name to term will do. That construction should tell a candidate how to prepare. Learn the terms and their coiners as pairs with dates, not as a list of names to be recognised — Haeckel and ecology in 1866, Tansley and the ecosystem in 1935, Shelford and the law of tolerance, Elton and the food chain and niche, Lindeman and the trophic-level energy flow. Note the printed page as well: the English stem capitalises 'Scientists' in the middle of the sentence and puts Ecology inside double quotation marks. Neither affects the sense, and the card reproduces the stem as printed rather than tidying it.

• The term 'ecology' (German Ökologie) was coined in 1866 by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, from the Greek oikos, meaning house or dwelling place, and logos, meaning study of.
• Haeckel also coined the terms phylum, phylogeny and protista, and is remembered for the recapitulation theory summarised as 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' and for the plates of 'Kunstformen der Natur'.
• The term 'ecosystem' was coined in 1935 by the British botanist Sir Arthur George Tansley, who wrote 'These ecosystems, as we may call them, are of the most various kinds and sizes' — sixty-nine years after Haeckel named the discipline.
• Victor Ernest Shelford (1877-1968), an American zoologist, gave ecology the law of tolerance, was the first president of the Ecological Society of America in 1915, wrote 'Animal Communities in Temperate America' (1913) and 'The Ecology of North America' (1963), and founded the body that became The Nature Conservancy.
• Charles J. Krebs, born 1936, is a Canadian population ecologist known for the textbook 'Ecology: The Experimental Analysis of Distribution and Abundance', for the fence-effect experiment of 1965 and for two decades of work on the ten-year snowshoe hare cycle in the Yukon.

• Attaching Tansley to 'ecology' rather than to 'ecosystem' — the two coinings are sixty-nine years and two men apart, and this is the specific confusion the option set is built on
• Recognising a name from a textbook cover and assuming it belongs to the founding period of the subject
• Confusing Haeckel's several coinages with one another, since phylum, phylogeny and protista are also his and are asked separately
• Mixing up Shelford's law of tolerance with Liebig's law of the minimum, which addresses the deficiency end of the same problem
• Preparing coiner questions as a list of names to be recognised rather than as name-term-date triples, which is the only form in which they can actually be answered

Environment and ecology questions in MPSC papers fall into three groups. The first is terminological and historical — who coined a term, when, and in which work — and it is answerable only from prepared pairs. The second is conceptual, covering food chains and webs, trophic levels, ecological pyramids, the ten per cent rule, succession, and the productivity of different ecosystems. The third is Indian and applied, covering biosphere reserves, national parks and sanctuaries, the Wildlife Protection Act, the Biological Diversity Act, and the state of Maharashtra's own protected areas and Western Ghats issues. The first group is the cheapest to prepare and the most often skipped: half a page of coiner-and-term pairs with dates covers a question that recurs in almost every cycle, and it costs a single sitting to learn.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The term 'ecosystem' was coined in 1935 by which of the following ?

  • (a)Ernst Haeckel
  • (b)A. G. Tansley
  • (c)Charles Elton
  • (d)Eugene Odum

  Answer(b) A. G. Tansley — the British botanist introduced the term in 1935, writing that 'These ecosystems, as we may call them, are of the most various kinds and sizes', and insisting that organisms and their physical surroundings be treated as a single system. Ernst Haeckel had coined 'ecology' itself in 1866; Charles Elton gave the subject the food chain, the ecological niche and the pyramid of numbers; and Eugene Odum is remembered for the textbook synthesis that made ecosystem ecology the organising framework of the discipline.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Shelford's law of tolerance states which of the following ?

  • (a)Energy transfer between successive trophic levels is about ten per cent efficient
  • (b)The growth of an organism is limited by the nutrient present in the smallest quantity relative to need
  • (c)The presence and abundance of a species are limited by the range it can tolerate of each environmental factor, with both deficiency and excess acting as limits
  • (d)Every species occupies a distinct ecological niche and no two species can occupy the same niche indefinitely

  Answer(c) The presence and abundance of a species are limited by the range it can tolerate of each environmental factor, with both deficiency and excess acting as limits — which is the extension Victor Shelford made to Liebig's earlier law of the minimum, described in the second option, that concerns deficiency alone. The ten per cent figure in the first option is Lindeman's rule for energy transfer between trophic levels, and the fourth option states the competitive exclusion principle associated with Gause.