Below I reproduce, with permission from our lovely foreign correspondent (who will either need a pseudonym or a website of her own someday) a brief portion of a Plant Ecology exam. She liked the haiku-like quality of the problems. I liked the test itself (which I failed). The test is, naturally, posted only for the amusement of readers and not for any underhanded and scurrilous academic evasion. They've all been turned in anyway.

Wilford Weatherly was the third of the Weatherly brothers. He was an evolutionary plant ecologist who constantly wondered why certain plant and environmental characteristics fit together and why some combinations were never observed in nature. He was also an avidly interested in the application of plant ecological principles to societal challenges. Below are a number of his “brain teasers” that you should have no difficulty figuring out. As was typical of Wilford, for each question below, there is a set of characters - some plant and some environmental. What we first need to know is would you expect to find characters together in the same plant or do the plant and environmental characters fit together? Answer with a "yes" or a "no". If not, why not? If so, do they represent a particular adaptive syndrome characteristic of a specific species or group of species from a particular environment? Can you possibly identify the plant? Where is that environment?

...

b. high photosynthetic rate
glacial atmospheric CO2 concentrations
C3 photosynthesis
...

d. Kyoto Protocol
ozone
UV-B
...

f. invasive species
annual life form
associated with greater fire frequencies in invaded regions
...

k. enzymatic oxygenase activity
enzymatic carboxylase activity
PEP carboxylase


l. a species tolerant of moderate, fast-moving fires
non-serotinous cones
tree
...

r. overgrazing in Utah
shrubland emergence
forest fire policies
...

BONUS.

u. high plant biological diversity
endemic species
herbaceous life forms

No, I'm not going to provide the answers.