The annals of improbable research is a publication for scientific research that "first makes you laugh, then makes you think", they are the ones behind the ig-nobel prize for one and in general they work on increasing the understanding of science.

Anyway, they have developed something called a 24/7, you get 24 seconds to summarize a scientific field, then seven words to define it in a way that even a child would understand. It's a pretty useful excercise in trying to explain something complex in simple terms, and the results are frequently rather poetic.

This is my own attemp at a 24/7, however, I wont be able to define ecology as succincty as my ecology proffessor. His definition was "N=?". N ususally stands for population size, and pretty much all ecology is is all the different factors that influence population size.