Environment & Ecology GK Questions with Answers – Page 14

Statements 1 and 3 are correct; heavy metals cannot be readily and completely removed by microbes. Bioremediation uses living organisms, mostly bacteria and fungi, to break down pollutants.

The Malabar Civet and the Sambar Deer are active after sunset, while the Lion-tailed Macaque is a daytime animal.

The Palghat gap, about thirty kilometres wide in Palakkad district of Kerala, is the broadest break in the whole chain and carries the road and the railway line that join Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu to Palakkad and Thrissur in Kerala.

It was constituted under the Environment (Protection) Act to advise the central government on coastal matters and to work with the State and Union Territory Coastal Zone Management Authorities, which examine proposals and prepare the Coastal Zone Management Plans that draw the High Tide Line and the zone boundaries on…

That strategy asked that land falling within ten kilometres of the boundaries of National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries be notified as ecologically fragile, and the National Wildlife Action Plan carried the same thought forward, which is how the ten kilometre figure entered the discussion on Eco-Sensitive Zones.

The first Coastal Regulation Zone notification was issued in February 1991 under the Environment (Protection) Act, declaring the coastal stretches and the waters influenced by the tide as a regulated zone and classifying them for the first time.

Anamudi rises to 2,695 metres in the Anaimalai or Elephant hills of Idukki district in Kerala and is the highest point not only of the Western Ghats but of the whole of peninsular India, higher than anything south of the Himalayas.

Eco-Sensitive Zone notifications sort activities into three lists, and the permitted list encourages exactly these practices along with the agriculture and horticulture that local people already carry on, the use of renewable energy and the adoption of green technology, because the purpose of the zone is to limit damaging industry…

This category holds the ecologically sensitive stretches of the coast, and the notification lists mangroves, coral reefs and coral areas, sand dunes, salt marshes, mudflats, biologically active areas and the nesting grounds of turtles and birds in its sub-category CRZ-I-A, where construction is effectively barred.

The Coastal Regulation Zone notification fixes the landward limit of the regulated belt at 500 metres from the High Tide Line along the sea, and that figure has stayed the same through the notifications of 1991, 2011 and 2019.

The group that K. Kasturirangan headed reported in 2013 and used satellite imagery to separate the natural landscape of the Ghats from the cultivated and built-up land.

Its report of 2011 held that the whole range deserved protection and divided it into three graded zones, ESZ-1, ESZ-2 and ESZ-3, with the strictest ban on mining, quarrying and large projects in ESZ-1, and proposed a Western Ghats Ecology Authority to supervise the regime.

The Western Ghats were added to the World Heritage List in 2012 as a serial natural property, that is, a single listing made up of thirty-nine separate sites scattered through Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra rather than one continuous block of land.

The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change notifies an Eco-Sensitive Zone using the power in Section 3(2)(v) of that Act, read with Rule 5(1) of the Environment (Protection) Rules, 1986, which lets the central government restrict industries and operations in an area it treats as fragile.

Connell showed in the field that on the intertidal rocks of the Scottish coast the larger and faster-growing barnacle Balanus physically crowds out the smaller Chathamalus wherever the two settle together, so that Chathamalus survives only higher up the shore where Balanus cannot tolerate the exposure.

In a mycorrhiza the threads of a fungus grow around or inside the fine roots of a plant and greatly extend the surface from which minerals, especially phosphorus, can be absorbed from the soil.

Brood parasitism is the habit of laying eggs in the nest of another species and letting the host bird incubate them and feed the young.

In amensalism one species is harmed while the other neither gains nor loses, a pattern written as minus and zero.

Rhizobium lives inside the nodules on the roots of legumes such as gram, pea, groundnut and arhar. The bacterium converts atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, a form the plant can absorb and build into proteins, while the plant supplies the bacterium with shelter and with sugars made in photosynthesis.

Robert Paine removed the predatory starfish Pisaster from rocky intertidal pools and found that within a short time the mussels it had been eating took over the rock surface and crowded out other animals, so that more than ten invertebrate species were lost from the pools.