Biodiversity
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50 free Biodiversity trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Biodiversity is the variety of living things on Earth, from the microbes in a spoonful of soil to the largest whales, along with the forests, grasslands and wetlands they build together. It is the reason crops can resist disease, medicines turn up in unlikely plants, and the loss of a single predator can reshape a whole landscape. This quiz starts with the basics, such as what the word means and how scientists measure the variety of living things. It then moves on to the places where wildlife is richest, the animals and plants that have vanished, and the ones pulled back from the brink. Along the way it covers the naturalists who mapped the natural world and the global agreements meant to protect it. The questions suit students revising for a biology or environmental science class, teachers who need a ready-made printable quiz, and anyone curious about nature. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which wild cat is so inbred that unrelated animals can accept each other's skin grafts?
Cheetah
Cheetah numbers crashed about 12,000 years ago, and the survivors' descendants are so alike that a skin graft from a stranger heals like the animal's own.
Q 02Which fruit's top export variety, Gros Michel, was ruined by a fungus and replaced by the Cavendish?
Banana
Banana plants of one variety are clones raised from suckers, so near-identical Gros Michel plantations fell together in the 1950s. The Cavendish is cloned the same way.
Q 03Which insects, whose front wings form hard cases, make up about one in four known animal species?
Beetles
Beetles number about 400,000 described species, and new ones are found so often that the true total may be as high as two million.
Q 04Which country dug a vault into an Arctic mountain to store backup copies of the world's crop seeds?
Norway
Norway paid for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which opened in 2008 some 130 metres inside a sandstone mountain on the island of Spitsbergen.
Q 05Which habitats cover under 0.1% of the ocean yet house at least a quarter of all marine species?
Coral reefs
Coral reefs are built by colonies of tiny animals called polyps, and their crowded variety has earned them the nickname rainforests of the sea.
Q 06Which North American bird, once billions strong, vanished when the last one, Martha, died in 1914?
Passenger pigeon
Passenger pigeon flocks were shot and sold as cheap meat on a massive scale, and Martha, the last known bird, died at the Cincinnati Zoo.
Q 07The flightless dodo, last reliably sighted in 1662, lived only on which Indian Ocean island?
Mauritius
Mauritius was the dodo's only home, and within a lifetime of Dutch sailors first recording the bird in 1598, hunting and introduced animals had wiped it out.
Q 08Which animal, modelled on London Zoo's Chi Chi, has been the World Wildlife Fund's logo since 1961?
Giant panda
Giant panda Chi Chi had moved from Beijing to London in 1958, and the naturalist Peter Scott designed the logo from sketches of the animal.
Q 09Ireland's Great Famine was deepened by reliance on a single variety, the Lumper, of which crop?
Potato
Potato fields planted with near-identical Lumpers had little defence when blight arrived in the 1840s, and about a million people died.
Q 10Tiny biting midges are the natural pollinators of the tree that gives us which food?
Chocolate
Chocolate begins with cacao flowers, which are pollinated by midges of the genus Forcipomyia, and the flies set more fruit than artificial pollination does.
Q 11Biodiversity has three levels: ecosystems, species and which third kind, found within one species?
Genetic
Genetic diversity is the variety of genes inside one species, and conserving it means protecting many separate populations rather than a single group.
Q 12What word describes a species, like Australia's koala, that lives wild in only one region?
Endemic
Endemic species are confined to one defined place, so a plant or animal that is native somewhere but also lives elsewhere does not qualify.
Q 13Which building term names a species, like the sea otter, whose loss can collapse an ecosystem?
Keystone
Keystone species are named after the stone at the top of an arch, which bears the least pressure of any yet brings the whole arch down if it is removed.
Q 21What name did ecologist Norman Myers give regions rich in unique species but fast losing habitat?
Hotspots
Hotspots must hold at least 1,500 plant species found nowhere else and have lost 70% of their original vegetation. Together they cover only about 2.5% of Earth's land surface.
Q 22Which Harvard ant specialist edited the 1988 volume BioDiversity, which popularised the new word?
E. O. Wilson
E. O. Wilson credited the word itself to Walter G. Rosen, who coined it while organising the 1986 national forum that the book grew out of.
Q 23Which island nation, whose only native land mammals are bats, evolved flightless birds like the kakapo and moa?
New Zealand
Q 14Which term describes an introduced species, like the cane toad, that harms its new environment?
Invasive
Invasive is the label for the cane toad, which was brought to Australia to control an insect pest of sugar cane and then spread across the north.
Q 15Species counts tend to rise toward which line, a pattern called the latitudinal diversity gradient?
The equator
The equator runs through the warm, highly productive zone where diversity peaks, and the pattern holds for land animals and sea creatures alike.
Q 16On which island, adrift since splitting from India in the dinosaur era, are all lemurs native?
Madagascar
Madagascar has been isolated for so long that about 90% of its plants and animals are found nowhere else, every lemur species among them.
Q 17Lonesome George, the last known Pinta Island tortoise, died in 2012 in which Pacific archipelago?
Galápagos Islands
Galápagos Islands rangers never found another Pinta tortoise after George was first spotted in 1971, so his kind ended with him.
Q 18Which predator, wiped out of Yellowstone National Park by 1926, was released there again in 1995?
Gray wolf
Gray wolf packs returned when 14 animals captured in Canada were released from pens in the Lamar Valley, ending almost 70 years without a resident pack in the park.
Q 19Which Swedish naturalist devised two-part Latin names, such as Homo sapiens, for living things?
Linnaeus
Linnaeus first applied such names consistently in his 1753 book Species Plantarum, which remains the official starting point for naming plants.
Q 20Which animals, ravaged by the chytrid skin fungus, are the most threatened class of vertebrates?
Amphibians
Amphibians have about 41% of their species at risk, and the chytrid disease alone has been linked to declines in at least 500 of them.
New Zealand had no land mammals except bats when people arrived, so birds filled their roles on the ground, and the moa were hunted out within two centuries of settlement.
Q 24Which Siberian lake, the oldest and deepest on Earth, has a freshwater seal found nowhere else?
Baikal
Lake Baikal is 25 to 30 million years old and holds over a fifth of the world's fresh surface water, more than all the North American Great Lakes combined.
Q 25Blue agave, the tequila plant, is pollinated in the wild by long-nosed species of which animal?
Bat
Bat pollination is skipped on tequila farms, where growers cut off the flower stalk and replant shoots instead, leaving the crop short of variety.
Q 26Which farming practice, seen in vast unbroken fields of wheat or maize, invites pests and disease?
Monoculture
Monoculture makes planting and harvesting efficient, but when every plant is alike a disease can spread rapidly across large areas.
Q 27Which geological period ended with the Great Dying, the most severe mass extinction on record?
Permian
Permian seas lost about 81% of their species in the event, which was also the greatest known mass extinction of insects.
Q 28Which Pulitzer-winning book by Elizabeth Kolbert argues that humans are causing a mass die-off?
The Sixth Extinction
The Sixth Extinction grew out of a New Yorker article of almost the same name, and it sets today's losses beside the great die-offs in the fossil record.
Q 29Which period's 'explosion' saw nearly every major animal group first appear in the fossil record?
Cambrian
Cambrian fossils appear so abruptly that Charles Darwin listed the lack of earlier ones among the main difficulties for his theory of evolution.
Q 30In which city did the 1992 Earth Summit open the Convention on Biological Diversity for signing?
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro's summit opened the UN climate convention for signature as well, making one June meeting the birthplace of two major environmental treaties.