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An organism is any living thing that functions as an individual. [1] Such a definition raises more problems than it solves, not least because the concept of an individual is also difficult. Many criteria, few of them widely accepted, have been proposed to define what an organism is.
Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the biological kingdom Animalia (/ ˌ æ n ɪ ˈ m eɪ l i ə / [4]).With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, have myocytes and are able to move, can reproduce sexually, and grow from a hollow sphere of cells, the blastula, during embryonic development.
The hierarchy of biological classification's eight major taxonomic ranks. A genus contains one or more species. Minor intermediate ranks are not shown. A species (pl.: species) is a population of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. [1]
Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from matter that does not. It is defined descriptively by the capacity for homeostasis, organisation, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction.
This glossary of biology terms is a list of definitions of fundamental terms and concepts used in biology, the study of life and of living organisms.It is intended as introductory material for novices; for more specific and technical definitions from sub-disciplines and related fields, see Glossary of cell biology, Glossary of genetics, Glossary of evolutionary biology, Glossary of ecology ...
Evolution in organisms occurs through changes in heritable characteristics—the inherited characteristics of an organism. In humans, for example, eye colour is an inherited characteristic and an individual might inherit the "brown-eye trait" from one of their parents. [ 21 ]
An organism that feeds primarily or exclusively on bacteria. behavioral ecology A branch of ecology which studies the ecological and evolutionary basis of animal behavior, mainly at the level of individual animals. benthos beta diversity The ratio between regional and local species diversity, or the difference in diversity between different ...
The definition was posited because extinct organisms are hardest to classify: they can be offshoots that diverged from a phylum's line before the characters that define the modern phylum were all acquired. By Budd and Jensen's definition, a phylum is defined by a set of characters shared by all its living representatives.