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The majority of animal species are invertebrates; one estimate puts the figure at 97%. [1] Many invertebrate taxa have a greater number and diversity of species than the entire subphylum of Vertebrata. [2] Invertebrates vary widely in size, from 10 μm (0.0004 in) [3] myxozoans to the 9–10 m (30–33 ft) colossal squid. [4]
Invertebrate zoology is the subdiscipline of zoology that consists of the study of invertebrates, animals without a backbone (a structure which is found only in fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals).
Marine invertebrates are invertebrate animals that live in marine habitats, and make up most of the macroscopic life in the oceans. It is a polyphyletic blanket term that contains all marine animals except the marine vertebrates , including the non- vertebrate members of the phylum Chordata such as lancelets , sea squirts and salps .
Most animals called "worms" are invertebrates, but the term is also used for the amphibian caecilians and the slowworm Anguis, a legless burrowing lizard. Invertebrate animals commonly called "worms" include annelids, nematodes, flatworms, nemerteans, chaetognaths, priapulids, and insect larvae such as grubs and maggots.
As with other invertebrates, the respiratory pigments of those arthropods that have them are generally dissolved in the blood and rarely enclosed in corpuscles as they are in vertebrates. [ 62 ] The heart is a muscular tube that runs just under the back and for most of the length of the hemocoel.
Crustaceans (from Latin meaning: "those with shells" or "crusted ones") are invertebrate animals that constitute one group of arthropods that are a part of the subphylum Crustacea (/ k r ə ˈ s t eɪ ʃ ə /), a large, diverse group of mainly aquatic arthropods including decapods (shrimps, prawns, crabs, lobsters and crayfish), seed shrimp, branchiopods, fish lice, krill, remipedes, isopods ...
The term typically refers to non-panarthropod invertebrates from the kingdom Animalia, although many non-vascular plants (mosses and algae), fungi (such as jelly fungus), lichens and slime molds can also be seen as soft-bodied organisms by definition. All animals have a muscular system of some sort but, since myocytes are tensile actuator units ...
An aquatic animal is any animal, whether vertebrate or invertebrate, that lives in a body of water for all or most of its lifetime. [1]