Question

The term ‘ecology’ was coined by:
A. Linnaeus
B. William
C. Odum
D. Haeckel

Answer 1

Hint: The term ‘ecology’ was coined by a German zoologist who is a follower of Charles Darwin and who suggested new ideas of human evolutionary descent. He claimed that the ontogeny (the embryology and development of the individual) had been briefly, and often necessarily incomplete, recapitulated, or repeated, phylogeny (the evolutionary history of the species or race).

Complete answer:
Ecology is the biological branch which focuses on the interaction between organisms and their environment, interaction between organisms.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, ecology developed considerably. It started with Carl Linnaeus and his work on nature's economy. Systematics term for the book Systema Naturae was coined by Linnaeus.

William Bateson was the first person to explain the theory of inheritance using genetics. To the Mendelian experiments, William Bateson gave the word genetics.
Concept of ecosystem was adopted and further developed by Odum.

The word ecology was coined by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, who used the term oekologie to mean "the relationship of the animal to both its organic and its inorganic environment." The word comes from the Greek oikos, meaning a "place to live."

Hence, The correct answer is option (D).

Additional information:
In the second half of the twentieth century, the word "ecology," with an increasingly aware environment, has since become a popular term, and is well used by Ernst Haeckel, a German zoologist and a successor of Charles Darwin, intended to designate a biological division, called "oecology," that would explicitly address the relationship between organisms and their 'external world.' It is now being used in reference to a variety of structures, from cultural, social and economic to spiritual, as well as being used in the context of various environmental movements.

Note: Haeckel was a German zoologist, naturalist, philosopher, physicist, educator, marine biologist, and an artist, who found, identified and named thousands of new species and mapped a genealogical tree that linked all life forms and also coined the terms such as ecology, phylum, phylogeny and Protista.