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English: The physiological unity of plants and animals: a lecture delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society, on Sunday afternoon, 30th January, 1881 by Boulger, G.S. Conway Hall digital collections
The classification of living things into animals and plants is an ancient one. Aristotle (384–322 BC) classified animal species in his History of Animals, while his pupil Theophrastus (c. 371 –c. 287 BC) wrote a parallel work, the Historia Plantarum, on plants. [7]
Numerous animals have coevolved with plants; flowering plants have evolved pollination syndromes, suites of flower traits that favour their reproduction. Many, including insect and bird partners , are pollinators , visiting flowers and accidentally transferring pollen in exchange for food in the form of pollen or nectar .
Plant-animal interactions are important pathways for the transfer of energy within ecosystems, where both advantageous and unfavorable interactions support ecosystem health. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Plant-animal interactions can take on important ecological functions and manifest in a variety of combinations of favorable and unfavorable associations, for ...
An 1834 English translation uses the term Radiata, and titles the division "The Zoophytes, or Animalia Radiata", [10] an expanded 1840 translation notes that "Neither of these names is literally applicable, for all the animals in the division are not radiated; and the very name Zoophyte, 'plant - animal,' is a contradiction. In England, the ...
Animals have several characteristics that set them apart from other living things. Animals are eukaryotic and multicellular. [14] Unlike plants and algae, which produce their own nutrients, [15] animals are heterotrophic, [16] [17] feeding on organic material and digesting it internally. [18] With very few exceptions, animals respire aerobically.
The corresponding terms for plants and fungi are flora and funga, respectively. Flora, fauna, funga and other forms of life are collectively referred to as biota. Zoologists and paleontologists use fauna to refer to a typical collection of animals found in a specific time or place, e.g. the "Sonoran Desert fauna" or the "Burgess Shale fauna".
Linnaeus's Systema Naturae lists only about 10,000 species of organisms, of which about 6,000 are plants and 4,236 are animals. [9] According to the historian of botany William T. Stearn , "Even in 1753 he believed that the number of species of plants in the whole world would hardly reach 10,000; in his whole career he named about 7,700 species ...