Читать книгу Oceans For Dummies - Joseph Kraynak - Страница 24

The ocean is teeming with life, from coastline to open ocean and from surface to seafloor. These living beings can be broken down into six groups (technically known as kingdoms) — Plants, Animals, Protists, Fungi, Archaebacteria, and Eubacteria. In this book, we break them into three groups — microbes (generally too small to see with the naked eye), plants (and other organisms that require sunlight for energy and growth), and animals. Each of these groups can be broken down further; for example, the animal kingdom includes simple invertebrates (such as sponges and jellies), mollusks (such as snails and clams), crustaceans (such as crabs and lobsters), fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals.

In this section, we cover the bare bones of taxonomy — the classification system used to assign organisms to specific groups — and introduce you to the groups of organisms we cover in Part 3.