Ecology is the study of how plants and animals interact with one another and their environment.
Therefore, if you study how leaf-eating insects affect a tree's growth rate, you're studying an aspect of ecology. The same is true if you study how spraying insecticides to control mosquitoes affects local frog populations, if you study how weather patterns influence the timing of bird migration, and if you study how traffic noise from a busy highway affects squirrel nesting habits. You can sit on Grandma's porch and for hours study pollination in the white and pink azaleas at the porch's corner, just beyond the plaster deer in the picture, and you could wonder what would happen to the local ecology if the pollinators there didn't have the azaleas to visit. If you wonder about such questions and then begin studying the situation, you're studying ecology . In Grandma's yard, if you lie down and poke your nose in the grass around the deer, or explore the woodchips strewn around the deer, you'll stir up all kinds of insects and other arthropods.