Kevin Ryan, age 13, of Spokane, Washington, for his question:

What does  the word ecology really mean?

This word has been around a long time, though it did not come to public attention until things obviously began to go wrong. Like most scientific terms it was coined from older words. The last four letters of this word mean a "study" or "science." At one time, it was spelled "oecology" because the first part was borrowed from a Greek word meaning house, home or dwelling place. This rather slanted the new science toward the habitats and living conditions in the world of nature.

As ecologists dug into their favorite study, they found it more and more impossible to separate living things from their habitats. They saw the world of nature as a global network of ecosystems in which the habitats and all their plants and animals depended upon each other. An ecosystem may be upset by a change in climate or land formation or the loss of just one native species. Ecology is the study of this global network of plants and animals, inter related with the local habitats.