Animal
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 This grey nurse shark (Carcharias taurus) and the smaller fish surrounding it are animals.
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Infrakingdom Eumetazoa
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The animals (from the Latin animale and anima, meaning "vital breath") are those organisms classified into the kingdom Animalia. Together they make up a wide segment of life and include an incredibly diverse array of both familiar and strange creatures, ranging from hawks to humans and sea slugs to spiders. Nonetheless, they all share certain characteristics: all animals are multicellular eukaryotes and also ingest their food and move by their own power at some point in their life cycle. Animals are essential consumers in many ecosystems and many are also important in human societies and economies.[1]
Characteristics
Cells and tissues
Animals are eukaryotic, meaning that they are comprised of cells which contain a nucleus. Unlike plants and fungi, their cells lack cell walls. Unlike bacteria, archaea and most protists, they are also multicellular: their bodies are made of many cells attached to one another.[1]
Animal cells are organized into specialized, integrated structures called tissues, which may in turn be organized into organs. Common to all animals is epithelium, a protective tissue covering their surfaces.[1] Many animals also share other structures such as guts (chambers with one or more openings for digestion), muscles (organs which contract for locomotion), and nerves (tissues which transmit signals between cells).
In addition, animals may be grouped by the number of tissue layers their embryos have. Sponges have but one, while diploblasts have two and triploblasts have three. In diploblasts and triploblasts, the inner layer is called the endoderm (which develops into the gut and associated tissue) and the outer layer is called the ectoderm (which develops into skin and the nervous system). Triploblasts also have a layer in between called the mesoderm, which develops into many internal organs such as the circulatory system, muscle, and bone.[1]
Food and energy
In one of the many unique ways animals obtain food, rancher ants drink sugary juice from aphids in return for the aphids' protection.
Animals are heterotrophs: they obtain nutrients by ingesting food from outside, generally digesting food in an internal chamber. This separates them from plants, algae, and other autotrophs, which do not ingest food. They are consumers that often occupy the higher levels of food chains in many ecosystems.[1] They obtain their food in a dazzling array of methods: for instance, rancher ants tend aphids and harvest the sugar that they secrete. [2]
Methods of obtaining food
Animals obtain food in many ways, but most can be grouped into two types. The first, predation is a biological interaction where a heterotroph, called the predator, obtains food by consuming the cells of another organism, called the prey. Herbivores are predators that primarily consume autotrophs, carnivores are predators that primarily consume heterotrophs, and omnivores are predators that consume both autotrophs and heterotrophs.
Many animals also practice detritivory, where a heterotroph consumes food from detritus: dead organic matter. Like the fungi and bacteria, detritivore animals recycle nutrients and are thus important in decomposition.
Methods of feeding
The methods of feeding that animals use may be grouped into four general tactics. Suspension feeding, or filter feeding, filters out and concentrates food particles suspended in water or air, such as a baleen whale filtering out plankton. Deposit feeding swallows a substrate and ingests the microorganisms, detritus, and other cells within the substrate, such as an earthworm eats through soil. Fluid feeding sucks fluids such as body fluids from plants and animals, such as a butterfly drinking a flower's nectar. Mass feeding, or bulk feeding, eats chunks of flesh from prey into the mouth, such as a snail eating pieces of leaves. [1]
Body plan
Symmetry and cephalization
Animals, like other multicellular organisms, can be classified on their symmetry: are they symmetrical on zero, one, two, or more planes? The sponges are completely asymmetrical, but every other animal is symmetrical in at least one plane. Organisms symmetrical on more than two planes are radially symmetrical; they appear like the spokes of a bicycle wheel, and most alive today float in water or attach to substrates. Organisms with only one plane are bilaterally symmetrical; they have left and right sides and two ends, and they tend to possess longer and narrower bodies.[1]
Bilateral symmetry in animals also exhibit cephalization: the development a head on one end where feeding, sensory, and processing organs are concentrated. Bilateral symmetry and cephalization are both pervasive in animals, and it is thought that they enabled animals to more actively move and hunt.
Guts and body cavities
Animals may possess a gut. A gut is often described as a "tube with a tube": a long tube or chamber running through the body with one or more openings that can take in whatever food the animal consumes and digest it. The first opening, the gut's intake, is called the animal's mouth. If a gut has a second opening, on the other end of the tube, the opening is called an anus, and it is where remaining, undigested food is ejected. In radially symmetrical animals, the mouth is often found in the center. In bilaterally symmetrical animals, the mouth is usually in the head, nearby the animal's sensory organs, and the anus is likewise found on the opposite end of the head. Animals with only a mouth have a two-way gut (also called a blind gut), because food and waste must use the same opening. Animals with both mouths and anuses have a one-way gut, which can more efficiently process food and absorb nutrients.
Animals may also contain fluid-filled cavities inside their bodies, in which the gut and other organs may float. The cavity is called a either a coelom or pseudocoelom, depending on how it is sealed. enables an animal's internal organs to move independently in it, oxygen and nutrients to circulate within it, and an animal to move without limbs as a hydrostatic skeleton. Animals are often grouped by what kind of body cavity they have. Animals with coeloms are called coelomates, animals with pseudocoeloms are called pseudocoelomates, and animals that do not have any enclosed body cavity are called acoelomates.[1]
Movement
Animals are motile during at least one point of their life cycle. They move by a large variety of methods: swimming, crawling on a substrate, walking, or flying.[1]
Reproduction and life cycle
Origin and phylogeny
Animals are a clade, which means that all animals are linked through one common ancestor. A group of protists called the choanoflagellates are the closest living relatives to animals. In the past decades, molecular phylogeny has dramatically increased our understanding of the relationships among the many lineages of animals. Below is a summary of our current knowledge of the phylogeny of animals and how we group them to make sense of their bewildering diversity.
- The Porifera (sponges) of today are the closest, most basal animal phylum to the choanoflagellates and the first group among the surviving animals to separate from the rest. Like all animals, they possess multicellularity and epithelia, but are otherwise very different from the other animals below.
- True tissues, diploblasty, and symmetry separate the other animals from the sponges. First up are the two phyla Cnidaria (jellyfish and sea anemones) and Ctenophora (comb jellies) contain animals that are radially symmetric and diploblastic.
- Eventually, some animal lineage developed bilateral symmetry, cephalization, and triploblasty. The animals descended from that lineage form a large group, called Bilateria.
- The most ancient groups in Bilateria comprise the Acoelmorpha (small, gutless worms). These animals lack coeloms, which suggest the first bilateral animals developed from simple guts to complex coeloms.
- The other animals in Bilateria split into two clades: the protostomes and the deuterostomes. These two groups have some fundamental differences, especially in how their embryos develop. They are both described in more detail below.
Protostomes
The protostomes, all descended from one ancestor, can be distinguished by how their embryos form in a spiral.