Species Identification: Flora and Fauna

The question tests whether a candidate reads the common name or the animal.

• Item 1, the sea cow, is the dugong, a member of the order Sirenia, a fully aquatic herbivorous mammal that suckles its young and is the only marine mammal in India that is strictly herbivorous. It is a mammal.
• Item 2, the sea horse, is not a mammal. It is a bony fish of the genus Hippocampus in the family Syngnathidae, with gills, fins and a swim bladder; the male brood pouch that gives it its reputation for unusual parental care is often mistaken for a mammalian trait but is nothing of the kind.
• Item 3, the sea lion, is a pinniped in the family Otariidae, an eared seal, and is a mammal. The official answer (b), one and three only, follows. The governing principle, and the elimination route, is that the presence of the word sea in a common name says nothing about class: two of these three are mammals that returned to the sea, and the one whose name most suggests a fish, the sea horse, is the only actual fish in the set.

The lion tailed macaque, Macaca silenus, is endemic to the evergreen and semi evergreen rainforest of the Western Ghats, an arboreal and highly habitat specific primate confined to the upper canopy and intolerant of fragmentation, which is why it is among the most threatened primates in the world. Its range runs along the Ghats through the Anamalai, Palni and Kalakkad Mundanthurai tracts of Tamil Nadu, the Silent Valley, Periyar and Nelliampathy tracts of Kerala, and the Sirsi Honnavara and Sharavathi valley tracts of Karnataka, so items 1, 2 and 3 are correct.

• Item 4, Andhra Pradesh, is incorrect. The Western Ghats do not enter Andhra Pradesh at all, the State lying east of the Deccan plateau on the coastal and Eastern Ghats side, and its primate fauna is the bonnet macaque and the grey langur, not the lion tailed macaque. The official answer (a) follows. The governing principle, and the elimination route, is that this is not really a species question but a physiography question: the animal is a Western Ghats endemic, and the only listed State the Ghats do not touch is Andhra Pradesh, which removes options (c) and (d).
• Option (b), Kerala only, then fails on the well known Anamalai and Sirsi populations.

Only statement 2 is correct, so the official answer is (b). The Common Myna, Acridotheres tristis, is a familiar commensal of human and livestock landscapes and habitually forages on the ground among grazing cattle, taking grasshoppers and other insects flushed by their movement; the generic name itself means grasshopper hunter.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The Painted Stork is a wetland wader that feeds by tactile probing, wading in shallow water with its partly open bill submerged and snapping shut on contact with prey. It is a bird of jheels, tanks and marshes, not of dry grazing land, and it does not follow cattle.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. The Black-necked Crane is a high-altitude species of the Tibetan plateau, breeding in Ladakh and wintering in the Bhutan valleys and parts of Arunachal Pradesh, found in marshy high-altitude wetlands and associated agricultural fields; it is neither a countryside bird of the Indian plains nor a cattle follower. The design of the item is that the classic cattle follower, the Cattle Egret, is deliberately absent from the options, so a candidate expecting it must instead reason from the feeding ecology of each bird offered. Recognising that the Painted Stork is a tactile wetland feeder and the Black-necked Crane a Himalayan wetland species leaves the Common Myna alone.

• Statement 1 is correct. The dugong is the only strictly herbivorous marine mammal, an obligate seagrass grazer of the order Sirenia, which is why its distribution maps exactly onto seagrass meadows.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. In Indian waters the dugong survives only in the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay, the Gulf of Kachchh and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, all seagrass habitats; it is absent from most of the mainland coast.
• Statement 3 is correct: the dugong is listed in Schedule I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act 1972 and is also in CITES Appendix I. The official answer (c) follows. Elimination route: statement 2 is the discriminator, and the dependency of the animal on seagrass beds, established by statement 1, itself shows that it cannot occur along the entire coast, so the two statements are internally linked and a candidate who understands the first can reason to the second.

• Option (c) is correct. The Gangetic river dolphin, Platanista gangetica, was declared the National Aquatic Animal in October 2009 at the first meeting of the National Ganga River Basin Authority. It is a functionally blind freshwater cetacean that navigates and hunts by echolocation, and is an indicator species for the health of the Ganga system.
• Options (a), (b) and (d) are all Schedule I species of conservation concern and all are aquatic or semi-aquatic, but none carries national symbol status. The elimination route is the association of the national symbol with the Ganga, which was the object of the flagship river programme under which the designation was made.

• Option (a) is correct. The living root bridges, jingkieng jri, are built by the Khasi and Jaintia communities of Meghalaya in the Cherrapunji and Mawlynnong belt of the East Khasi Hills, by training the secondary aerial roots of the rubber fig, Ficus elastica, across a stream, often guided along a hollowed betel trunk, until they take hold on the far bank and thicken. Because the structure is alive it strengthens with age rather than decaying, which is the decisive detail in the stem, and it survives conditions that destroy timber and steel, this being among the wettest places on earth with annual rainfall of the order of eleven thousand millimetres.
• Options (b), (c) and (d) name regions with no such practice, and the ecology rules them out independently: Ficus elastica is a tree of the warm wet tropics, so the temperate Himachal hills cannot support it, and neither Jharkhand nor Tamil Nadu has the rainfall regime that makes the technique necessary or possible. The governing principle for the candidate is that the answer follows from rainfall, since only the north eastern hills combine extreme precipitation with steep stream crossings.

The Great Indian Hornbill is a large frugivorous bird of moist evergreen and semi-evergreen tropical forest, dependent on tall mature trees both for fruiting resources and for the large natural cavities in which the female seals herself during nesting. In India its stronghold is the Western Ghats, with a second population in the forests of the north-east and the Himalayan foothills. It is the state bird of Kerala and of Arunachal Pradesh, which is itself a useful memory anchor. Hence (d). The other three options fail on a single ecological principle applied consistently: each names a habitat that cannot support closed-canopy tall forest.

• Option (a), the sand deserts of the north-west, is arid scrub with no tall trees.
• Option (b), the higher Himalayas of Jammu and Kashmir, is temperate to alpine, above the altitudinal range of a tropical forest species.
• Option (c), the salt marshes of western Gujarat, is saline coastal wetland supporting waders and flamingos rather than canopy frugivores. The elimination route therefore requires no species-specific knowledge beyond recognising the bird as a large forest frugivore.

• Statement 1 is correct. The Kharai, found in the Kachchh region of Gujarat, is the only camel breed in the world adapted to swim, crossing creeks in the Gulf of Kachchh to reach mangrove islands, distances of around three kilometres being routinely reported.
• Statement 2 is correct and is the ecological basis of that behaviour: the breed browses on mangrove, principally Avicennia marina, and derives both nutrition and much of its water requirement from the saline foliage, which is why its distribution tracks the mangrove creeks so closely.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the eliminating statement. The Kharai is a domesticated breed, herded by the Jat and Rabari pastoralist communities of Kachchh, and its formal recognition as a registered breed by the National Bureau of Animal Genetic Resources presupposes domestication, since the register is of domestic animal genetic resources. Hence 1 and 2, giving (a).
• Options (b), (c) and (d) all fail with statement 3. The elimination route is available without any specific knowledge of the animal: the stem itself calls it a breed, and a breed is by definition the product of selective domestication, so statement 3 is self-contradictory with the question as framed.

• Statement 1 is correct. Pterocarpus santalinus, red sanders or red sandalwood, is endemic to a restricted tract of the Eastern Ghats in Andhra Pradesh, principally the Seshachalam, Veligonda, Lankamalla and Palakonda hills across Chittoor, Kadapa, Kurnool and Nellore. That narrow endemism, combined with the value of the timber in East Asian markets, is precisely what drives the smuggling that keeps it in the news.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and turns on habitat. Red sanders is a species of dry deciduous forest on rocky, degraded, red lateritic soils in a rain-shadow tract receiving modest rainfall; it is not a rain forest species at all, and the tropical rain forests of South India, the Western Ghats evergreen belt, are a different ecological world with an entirely different assemblage. The species is also not the dominant or most important tree even within its own formation. Hence (a).
• Options (b) and (c) require accepting the rain forest attribution, and (d) requires denying its South Indian occurrence, which the news reports themselves establish. The trap is the assumption that a valuable, threatened South Indian timber species must be a rain forest tree; the discriminator is that red sanders is a dry-tract endemic, and confusing it with Santalum album, sandalwood, compounds the error.

• Option (b) is correct. The National Chambal Sanctuary, extending along the Chambal across Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, holds much the largest surviving wild population of the gharial and is the mainstay of the species' recovery. The habitat requirement explains why: the gharial is a fish eating crocodilian with a narrow snout adapted to catching fish, needing clean, deep, fast flowing fresh water with sandbanks for basking and nesting, and the Chambal, being comparatively free of dams and pollution along that stretch, is the best remaining example of such a river.
• Option (a) is wrong and is the strongest distractor, since Bhitarkanika does hold a very large crocodilian population; but those are saltwater crocodiles, Crocodylus porosus, in a brackish mangrove estuary, and the gharial cannot occupy that habitat.
• Option (c) is wrong: Pulicat is a brackish coastal lagoon, notable for flamingos and other waterbirds.
• Option (d) is wrong: Deepor Beel in Assam is a freshwater lake and Ramsar site, notable for waterfowl and as an elephant habitat, but is a still water body and not a gharial river. Governing principle: fix the species to its habitat type first, here a clean fast flowing freshwater river, and the options resolve themselves, since three of the four are standing or brackish water.

• Option (b) is correct. Prosopis juliflora, known in India as vilayati kikar, seemai karuvelam or ganda baval, is a thorny leguminous shrub or small tree native to Central and South America and introduced into India from the nineteenth century onward for fuelwood and for the afforestation of degraded and arid land. It has become one of the most damaging invasive alien species in the country. It reduces biodiversity by several reinforcing mechanisms: a deep taproot that draws down soil moisture and the water table beyond the reach of native species, dense thorny thickets that exclude both grazing and regeneration, allelopathic chemicals in leaf litter that suppress germination of neighbouring plants, and prolific seed set dispersed by livestock that eat the pods. Its spread across the Banni grasslands of Kachchh, into Keoladeo and into Tamil Nadu, where the Madras High Court ordered its removal, is the reason it recurs in the news.
• Options (a) and (c) are wrong and are constructed on a plausible sounding pattern, since many tree species do yield extracts used in cosmetics or as biopesticides, neem being the standard Indian example; Prosopis is not known for either use, and its economic value in India is as fuelwood and charcoal.
• Option (d) is wrong because option (b) is true. Governing principle: when a species appears in the news and the question offers one ecological effect against two commercial uses, the ecological effect is almost always the reason for the coverage.

Hence (b).

• Statement 1 is correct. The Asiatic lion, Panthera leo persica, survives in the wild only in the Gir landscape of Gujarat, its former range across West and Central Asia having been extinguished, so India is the sole natural home.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. The double humped or Bactrian camel, Camelus bactrianus, occurs in Nubra in Ladakh in India but its natural range is Central Asia, including Mongolia, China, Kazakhstan and neighbouring states, where the wild Bactrian camel also persists; India holds a small and peripheral population, not an exclusive one.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. The greater one horned rhinoceros, Rhinoceros unicornis, occurs naturally in India, principally in Assam and North Bengal, and also in the Terai of Nepal, notably Chitwan, so it is not confined to India. Since only statement 1 holds, the official answer (a) follows. The governing principle is to separate the species India shares with its neighbours from the one it does not, and the rhinoceros and Nepal association is the standard discriminator.

• Pair 1 is correct. The blue finned mahseer, Tor khudree, is native to the Cauvery and the rivers of the Deccan, and the Cauvery mahseer is the subject of a long running conservation and angling debate.
• Pair 2 is incorrect. The Irrawaddy dolphin, Orcaella brevirostris, is a coastal and brackish water species whose Indian population is concentrated in Chilika Lake in Odisha, the largest known lagoon population in the world, and it also occurs in the Sundarbans. The river of the Chambal is the habitat of the Gangetic dolphin, Platanista gangetica, along with the gharial and the red crowned roofed turtle, which is what makes the National Chambal Sanctuary significant.
• Pair 3 is correct. The rusty spotted cat, Prionailurus rubiginosus, one of the smallest wild cats in the world, occurs across peninsular India including the Eastern Ghats, with records from Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and the Nallamalas. Since pairs 1 and 3 hold and pair 2 fails, the official answer (c) follows. The single decisive fact is the Irrawaddy dolphin and Chilika association, which is standard preparation and which, once held, points directly to (c), the only option that excludes pair 2 while retaining the others.

The Himalayan nettle, Girardinia diversifolia, locally known as bhimal or kandali in the western Himalaya and allo in Nepal, yields a long, strong bast fibre from its stem that has been spun and woven traditionally in the Himalayan belt and has attracted recent attention as a sustainable natural textile, so (d) is correct. The plant grows wild without cultivation inputs, is perennial and regenerates after harvest, which is why the word sustainable appears in the stem.

• Option (a) is wrong because the anti malarial associations are with Cinchona, the source of quinine, and Artemisia annua, the source of artemisinin, neither of which is a nettle.
• Option (b) is wrong because biodiesel feedstocks in the Indian context are oilseed bearing species such as Jatropha curcas, Pongamia pinnata and used cooking oil, and a nettle yields no oil bearing seed of consequence.
• Option (c) is wrong because paper pulp comes principally from bamboo, eucalyptus, subabul and agricultural residues, and nettle is not a pulp species. The clue lies in the botany, since a nettle is a herbaceous stem plant of the family Urticaceae, and stem plants of that kind are historically fibre plants, ramie being the closest commercial parallel.

• Statement 1 is correct. Elephant herds are matriarchal, the oldest and most experienced cow leading the group, while adult bulls leave the natal herd and live singly or in loose bachelor associations.
• Statement 2 is correct. Gestation ranges from about eighteen to twenty two months, the longest of any land mammal, a consequence of the prolonged brain development of the calf.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. Cows continue to breed well past forty and into their sixties, and the presence of post reproductive as well as breeding older females is central to herd knowledge and survival.
• Statement 4 is incorrect. Karnataka holds the largest elephant population among Indian states, followed by Assam, with Kerala third. The answer is 1 and 2, giving (a).
• Options (b) and (d) rest on the Kerala claim and (c) and (d) on the calving age claim.

Lemongrass, of the genus Cymbopogon, yields citronella and related essential oils that mask the carbon dioxide and lactic acid cues by which mosquitoes locate hosts, and it is the standard base for natural repellents.

• Option (a) Congress grass is Parthenium hysterophorus, an invasive weed known for dermatitis and allergic rhinitis, not repellency.
• Option (b) elephant grass, Pennisetum purpureum, is a fodder and biomass crop.
• Option (d) nut grass, Cyperus rotundus, is a persistent agricultural weed with medicinal tuber uses but no repellent application. Hence (c). The genus Cymbopogon is worth fixing in memory because it also supplies citronella grass and palmarosa, all repellent bearing.

A filter feeder strains suspended particles and plankton from water passing through a specialised structure. The oyster is a bivalve mollusc that draws water across its ctenidia, trapping phytoplankton on mucus strands and moving it to the mouth by ciliary action, so option (c) is correct.

• Option (a) catfish is a bottom dwelling predator and scavenger with barbels used to locate prey, not a strainer.
• Option (b) octopus is an active cephalopod predator that seizes crabs and molluscs with its arms and beak.
• Option (d) pelican scoops fish in its gular pouch, which is bulk capture of individual prey rather than filtration of suspended matter. Hence (c). Oysters are worth teaching alongside their ecosystem service role, since a single adult filters a large volume of water daily and oyster reefs are used in coastal water quality restoration.

• Statement 1 is incorrect on two counts: moringa belongs to the family Moringaceae, not to the legumes, and it is deciduous rather than evergreen, shedding leaves in the dry season.
• Statement 2 is incorrect: tamarind, Tamarindus indica, is native to tropical Africa despite its species name and its long naturalisation in India, so it is not endemic to South Asia.
• Statement 3 is correct: tamarind is gathered from trees on forest and common land and is classified as minor forest produce, which brings it within the rights recognised under the Forest Rights Act and the Minimum Support Price scheme for MFP.
• Statement 4 is correct: India exports both tamarind and moringa seed.
• Statement 5 is correct: the seeds of both are oil bearing and the oil can be transesterified into biodiesel, moringa oil in particular being studied for this purpose. Hence 3, 4 and 5, giving (b).
• Statement 2 is the more instructive error, since a species epithet indica is a notoriously unreliable guide to origin.

• Statement 1 is correct. Gucchi is the morel, a fungus of the genus Morchella, whose distinctive honeycombed cap is the fruiting body of the organism.
• Statement 2 is correct. It grows wild in the temperate coniferous and broadleaf forests of the western Himalaya, in Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, appearing after the snow melts.
• Statement 3 is incorrect on both of its elements. Morels have resisted reliable commercial cultivation because they depend on complex and imperfectly understood soil and mycorrhizal conditions, so the supply comes almost wholly from wild collection by hill communities, and this is precisely why the mushroom commands so high a price. The geography is wrong as well, since the harvest is from the western Himalaya rather than the north eastern foothills.
• Statements 1 and 2 holding, (c) is correct; options (b) and (d) admit the cultivation claim, and (a) drops the sound statement 2.

The golden mahseer, Tor putitora, is a large freshwater fish of the Himalayan and sub Himalayan rivers, prized as a sport fish and listed as endangered on account of dam construction, flow alteration and overfishing. It is therefore the odd one out and option (a) is correct.

• Option (b), the Indian nightjar, is a nocturnal insectivorous bird of open scrub, cryptically plumaged and known by its distinctive call.
• Option (c), the spoonbill, is a wading bird named for its spatulate bill, which it sweeps sideways through shallow water to feed.
• Option (d), the white ibis, more properly the black headed ibis in the Indian context, is a wetland wading bird with a long down curved bill. Since the other three are all birds, the fish is the answer.

Biological nitrogen fixation in crop plants is overwhelmingly a property of the legume family, Fabaceae, whose roots form nodules housing symbiotic rhizobia that reduce atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia in exchange for photosynthate. The question therefore reduces to identifying which of the six plants are legumes.

• Item 1, alfalfa or lucerne, Medicago sativa, is a legume and a classic nitrogen fixing fodder crop.
• Item 3, chickpea, Cicer arietinum, is a legume pulse.
• Item 4, clover, Trifolium species, is a legume long used in rotations for exactly this reason.
• Items 2 and 6, amaranth and spinach, both belong to the Amaranthaceae and fix no nitrogen; they are leafy vegetables that draw nitrogen from the soil.
• Item 5, purslane or kulfa, Portulaca oleracea, belongs to the Portulacaceae and likewise does not fix nitrogen, though it is noted for other traits such as its succulence and fatty acid content.
• Items 1, 3 and 4 alone qualify, so (a) is correct; options (b), (c) and (d) each admit at least one non leguminous leafy vegetable.

• Statement I is correct. Marsupials occur naturally in Australasia and the Americas, the opossums being the American representatives, and none is native to India. Their distribution is explained by the break up of Gondwana and the subsequent isolation of Australia rather than by any Indian habitat.
• Statement II is incorrect. Marsupials occupy an enormous range of habitats including deserts, tropical rainforest, woodland, wetland and urban edges, and they coexist with predators such as dingoes, quolls, raptors and snakes. The restriction to predator free montane grassland is invented.
• Statement I correct and Statement II false gives (c).
• Options (a) and (b) need Statement II to be true, and (d) inverts both.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Indian squirrels, principally the Indian palm squirrel and the giant squirrels, are arboreal and build leaf and fibre nests called dreys in trees or in cavities and building crevices. Ground burrowing is characteristic of ground squirrels and marmots elsewhere, not of the Indian species.
• Statement 2 is correct. Squirrels practise scatter hoarding, burying nuts and seeds at many shallow sites, a behaviour of ecological importance because forgotten caches germinate and the animals become seed dispersers.
• Statement 3 is correct. Squirrels are omnivorous, taking fruit, seeds, bark, flowers, and also insects, eggs and occasionally nestlings. Two statements stand, giving (b).
• Option (c) fails on the burrowing claim and (d) is ruled out by the caching and diet statements.

• Statement 1 is correct. Lions are aseasonal breeders and cubs may be born in any month, with breeding often synchronised within a pride rather than by season.
• Statement 2 is correct. Roaring depends on a specialised larynx with an incompletely ossified hyoid apparatus, present in the genus Panthera, that is lion, tiger, leopard and jaguar. The cheetah, Acinonyx jubatus, lies outside Panthera, has a fully ossified hyoid, and purrs, chirps and growls but cannot roar.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. Male leopards mark territory extensively by spraying urine, scraping and rubbing scent on vegetation, exactly as male lions do. Hence 1 and 2 only, which is (a).
• Options (b), (c) and (d) all retain the false claim about leopard scent marking.

• Statement I is incorrect on two independent counts, and either alone is fatal. Taxonomically the Peacock tarantula, Poecilotheria metallica, is an arachnid of the class Arachnida, with eight legs, two body segments and no antennae, whereas crustaceans are a separate subphylum characterised by two pairs of antennae and typically aquatic respiration. Dietarily it is a predator taking insects and other small arthropods, not an omnivore.
• Statement II is correct: the species is endemic to a very small patch of deciduous forest in the Eastern Ghats, in the Nandyal and Giddalur region of Andhra Pradesh, and this extreme restriction of range, compounded by habitat degradation and collection for the exotic pet trade, is why the IUCN lists it as Critically Endangered.
• Statement III is correct: it is arboreal, sheltering in holes and crevices of tall trees and spinning asymmetric funnel webs there, rather than living in ground burrows as many tarantulas do.
• Statements II and III hold, giving (d).
• Options (a) and (b) both retain the crustacean claim, and option (c) needlessly discards the arboreal habit. The taxonomic error in Statement I is the intended discriminator.

• Statement 1 is correct. The Hoollongapar Gibbon Sanctuary in Jorhat district of Assam is named for and dedicated to this species, and the Western Hoolock Gibbon is assessed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List.
• Statement 2 is correct, since gibbons are the specialists of brachiation among primates, with elongated forelimbs, a ball and socket wrist that allows the body to rotate beneath the grip, and a hook shaped hand that lets them swing hand over hand at speed through the canopy.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the eliminator. Gibbons are lesser apes weighing roughly six to eight kilograms, built light precisely because brachiation demands low mass and long arms, and the comparison with the heavy bodied, largely terrestrial and knuckle walking gorilla inverts their anatomy.

Hence 1 and 2 and (b) is correct, while (a) discards a straightforward fact of locomotion and (c) and (d) accept the gorilla comparison.

Only statement 1 is correct, so (a) is the answer. Doyang is the classic Indian example of a community turning from hunting to protection, the villages around Pangti in Wokha district having given up large scale netting of the roosting flocks after 2012 and taken up guarding and ecotourism instead, which is exactly sustained local conservation effort translating into safe passage for an international migrant.

• Statement 2 misstates what tracking does, since satellite tagging of individual falcons records and reveals the route, it does not guide the birds, whose navigation is innate and independent of human technology.
• Statement 3 is false on the biology, because Amur Falcons are passage migrants that halt at Doyang for a few weeks in October and November to feed and build fat reserves before continuing across the Arabian Sea to southern Africa, and no resident Indian population has established itself. (b), (c) and (d) each accept one of these two misconceptions.

• Statement 1 is correct, since Rhynchostylis retusa grows on the trunks and branches of trees, drawing moisture and nutrients from the air and from accumulated debris through thick aerial roots covered in velamen, without parasitising the host, which is the definition of an epiphyte.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the eliminator, because the species is widely distributed across tropical Asia, occurring in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Indochina, southern China, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines besides India, so it cannot be called endemic to the Northeast even though it is culturally identified with that region.
• Statement 3 is correct, since the foxtail orchid, known in Assam as kopou phul and associated with the Bihu festival, is the State flower of Assam and is also the State flower of Arunachal Pradesh.

Hence 1 and 3 and (b) is correct, while (c) and (d) accept the false endemism claim and (a) drops the State flower fact.