Animal
Animals are multicellular eukaryotic organisms that form the biological kingdom Animalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, are able to move, can reproduce sexually, grow from a hollow sphere of cells, the blastula, during embryonic development. Over 1.5 million living animal species have been described—of which around 1 million are insects—but it has been estimated there are over 7 million animal species in total. Animals range in length from 8.5 millionths of a metre to 33.6 metres and have complex interactions with each other and their environments, forming intricate food webs. The category includes humans, but in colloquial use the term animal refers only to non-human animals; the study of non-human animals is known as zoology. Most living animal species are in the Bilateria, a clade whose members have a bilaterally symmetric body plan; the Bilateria include the protostomes—in which many groups of invertebrates are found, such as nematodes and molluscs—and the deuterostomes, containing the echinoderms and chordates.
Life forms interpreted. Many modern animal phyla became established in the fossil record as marine species during the Cambrian explosion which began around 542 million years ago. 6,331 groups of genes common to all living animals have been identified. Aristotle divided animals into those with those without. Carl Linnaeus created the first hierarchical biological classification for animals in 1758 with his Systema Naturae, which Jean-Baptiste Lamarck expanded into 14 phyla by 1809. In 1874, Ernst Haeckel divided the animal kingdom into the multicellular Metazoa and the Protozoa, single-celled organisms no longer considered animals. In modern times, the biological classification of animals relies on advanced techniques, such as molecular phylogenetics, which are effective at demonstrating the evolutionary relationships between animal taxa. Humans make use of many other animal species for food, including meat and eggs. Dogs have been used in hunting, while many aquatic animals are hunted for sport.
Non-human animals have appeared in art from the earliest times and are featured in mythology and religion. The word "animal" comes from the Latin animalis, having soul or living being; the biological definition includes all members of the kingdom Animalia. In colloquial usage, as a consequence of anthropocentrism, the term animal is sometimes used nonscientifically to refer only to non-human animals. Animals have several characteristics. Animals are eukaryotic and multicellular, unlike bacteria, which are prokaryotic, unlike protists, which are eukaryotic but unicellular. Unlike plants and algae, which produce their own nutrients animals are heterotrophic, feeding on organic material and digesting it internally. With few exceptions, animals breathe oxygen and respire aerobically. All animals are motile during at least part of their life cycle, but some animals, such as sponges, corals and barnacles become sessile; the blastula is a stage in embryonic development, unique to most animals, allowing cells to be differentiated into specialised tissues and organs.
All animals are composed of cells, surrounded by a characteristic extracellular matrix composed of collagen and elastic glycoproteins. During development, the animal extracellular matrix forms a flexible framework upon which cells can move about and be reorganised, making the formation of complex structures possible; this may be calcified, forming structures such as shells and spicules. In contrast, the cells of other multicellular organisms are held in place by cell walls, so develop by progressive growth. Animal cells uniquely possess the cell junctions called tight junctions, gap junctions, desmosomes. With few exceptions—in particular, the sponges and placozoans—animal bodies are differentiated into tissues; these include muscles, which enable locomotion, nerve tissues, which transmit signals and coordinate the body. There is an internal digestive chamber with either one opening or two openings. Nearly all animals make use of some form of sexual reproduction, they produce haploid gametes by meiosis.
These fuse to form zygotes, which develop via mitosis into a hollow sphere, called a blastula. In sponges, blastula larvae swim to a new location, attach to the seabed, develop into a new sponge. In most other groups, the blastula undergoes more complicated rearrangement, it first invaginates to form a gastrula with a digestive chamber and two separate germ layers, an external ectoderm and an internal endoderm. In most cases, a third germ layer, the mesoderm develops between them; these germ layers differentiate to form tissues and organs. Repeated instances of mating with a close relative during sexual reproduction leads to inbreeding depression within a population due to the increased prevalence of harmful recessive traits. Animals have evolved numerous mechanisms for avoiding close inbreeding. In some species, such as the splendid fairywren, females benefit by mating with multiple males, thus producing more offspring of higher genetic quality; some animals are capable of asexual reproduction, which results
Wikispecies
Wikispecies is a wiki-based online project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aim is to create a comprehensive free content catalogue of all species. Jimmy Wales stated that editors are not required to fax in their degrees, but that submissions will have to pass muster with a technical audience. Wikispecies is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and CC BY-SA 3.0. Started in September 2004, with biologists across the world invited to contribute, the project had grown a framework encompassing the Linnaean taxonomy with links to Wikipedia articles on individual species by April 2005. Benedikt Mandl co-ordinated the efforts of several people who are interested in getting involved with the project and contacted potential supporters in early summer 2004. Databases were evaluated and the administrators contacted, some of them have agreed on providing their data for Wikispecies. Mandl defined two major tasks: Figure out how the contents of the data base would need to be presented—by asking experts, potential non-professional users and comparing that with existing databases Figure out how to do the software, which hardware is required and how to cover the costs—by asking experts, looking for fellow volunteers and potential sponsorsAdvantages and disadvantages were discussed by the wikimedia-I mailing list.
The board of directors of the Wikimedia Foundation voted by 4 to 0 in favor of the establishment of a Wikispecies. The project is hosted at species.wikimedia.org. It was merged to a sister project of Wikimedia Foundation on September 14, 2004. On October 10, 2006, the project exceeded 75,000 articles. On May 20, 2007, the project exceeded 100,000 articles with a total of 5,495 registered users. On September 8, 2008, the project exceeded 150,000 articles with a total of 9,224 registered users. On October 23, 2011, the project reached 300,000 articles. On June 16, 2014, the project reached 400,000 articles. On January 7, 2017, the project reached 500,000 articles. On October 30, 2018, the project reached 600,000 articles, a total of 1.12 million pages. Wikispecies comprises taxon pages, additionally pages about synonyms, taxon authorities, taxonomical publications, institutions or repositories holding type specimen. Wikispecies asks users to use images from Wikimedia Commons. Wikispecies does not allow the use of content.
All Species Foundation Catalogue of Life Encyclopedia of Life Tree of Life Web Project List of online encyclopedias The Plant List Wikispecies, The free species directory that anyone can edit Species Community Portal The Wikispecies Charter, written by Wales
Mantis
Mantises are an order of insects that contains over 2,400 species in about 430 genera in 15 families. The largest family is the Mantidae. Mantises are distributed worldwide in tropical habitats, they have triangular heads with bulging eyes supported on flexible necks. Their elongated bodies may or may not have wings, but all Mantodea have forelegs that are enlarged and adapted for catching and gripping prey; the closest relatives of mantises are the termites and cockroaches, which are all within the superorder Dictyoptera. Mantises are sometimes confused with stick insects, other elongated insects such as grasshoppers, or other unrelated insects with raptorial forelegs such as mantisflies. Mantises are ambush predators, but a few ground-dwelling species are found pursuing their prey, they live for about a year. In cooler climates, the adults lay eggs in autumn die; the eggs are protected by their hard capsules and hatch in the spring. Females sometimes practice sexual cannibalism. Mantises were considered to have supernatural powers by early civilizations, including Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, Assyria.
A cultural trope popular in cartoons imagines the female mantis as a femme fatale. Mantises are among the insects most kept as pets. Over 2,400 species of mantis in about 430 genera are recognized, they are predominantly found in tropical regions. The systematics of mantises have long been disputed. Mantises, along with stick insects, were once placed in the order Orthoptera with the cockroaches and rock crawlers. Kristensen combined the Mantodea with the cockroaches and termites into the order Dictyoptera, suborder Mantodea; the name mantodea is formed from the Ancient Greek words μάντις meaning "prophet", εἶδος meaning "form" or "type". It was coined in 1838 by the German entomologist Hermann Burmeister; the order is called the mantes, using a Latinized plural of Greek mantis. The name mantid properly refers only to members of the family Mantidae, the only family in the order; the other common name, praying mantis, applied to any species in the order, comes from the typical "prayer-like" posture with folded forelimbs.
The vernacular plural "mantises" was confined to the US, with "mantids" predominantly used as the plural in the UK and elsewhere, until the family Mantidae was further split in 2002. One of the earliest classifications splitting an all-inclusive Mantidae into multiple families was that proposed by Beier in 1968, recognizing eight families, though it was not until Ehrmann's reclassification into 15 families in 2002 that a multiple-family classification became universally adopted. Klass, in 1997, studied the external male genitalia and postulated that the families Chaeteessidae and Metallyticidae diverged from the other families at an early date. However, the Mantidae and Thespidae are still both considered polyphyletic, so the Mantodea will have to be revised; the earliest mantis fossils are about 135 million years old, from Siberia. Fossils of the group are rare: by 2007, only about 25 fossil species were known. Fossil mantises, including one from Japan with spines on the front legs as in modern mantises, have been found in Cretaceous amber.
Most fossils in amber are nymphs. Fossil mantises from the Crato Formation in Brazil include the 10 mm long Santanmantis axelrodi, described in 2003. Well-preserved specimens yield details as small; because of the superficially similar raptorial forelegs, mantidflies may be confused with mantises, though they are unrelated. Their similarity is an example of convergent evolution; the Mantodea Species File lists the following living families: Mantises have large, triangular heads with a beak-like snout and mandibles. They have two bulbous compound eyes, three small simple eyes, a pair of antennae; the articulation of the neck is remarkably flexible. The mantis thorax consists of a prothorax, a mesothorax, a metathorax. In all species apart from the genus Mantoida, the prothorax, which bears the head and forelegs, is much longer than the other two thoracic segments; the prothorax is flexibly articulated, allowing for a wide range of movements of the head and fore limbs while the remainder of the body remains more or less immobile.
Mantises have two grasping forelegs in which prey items are caught and held securely. In most insect legs, including the posterior four legs of a mantis, the coxa and trochanter combine as an inconspicuous base of the leg. Located at the base of the femur is a set of discoidal spines four in number, but ranging from none to as many as five depending on the species; these spines are preceded by a number of tooth-like tubercles, along with a similar series of
Stagmatoptera supplicaria
Stagmatoptera supplicaria is a species of praying mantis in the genus Stagmatoptera. List of mantis genera and species
Flower mantis
Flower mantises are those species of praying mantis that mimic flowers. Their coloration is an example of aggressive mimicry, a form of camouflage in which a predator's colours and patterns lure prey. Most species of flower mantis are in the family Hymenopodidae, their behaviour varies, but involves climbing a plant, staying still until a prey insect comes within range. Many species of flower mantis are popular as pets; the orchid mantis, Hymenopus coronatus, of southeast Asia mimics an orchid flower. It remains motionless on the plant. In his 1940 book Adaptive Coloration in Animals, Hugh Cott quotes an account by Nelson Annandale, saying that the mantis hunts on the flowers of the "Straits Rhododendron", Melastoma polyanthum; the nymph has what Cott calls "Special Alluring Coloration", where the animal itself is the "decoy". The insect is pink and white, with flattened limbs with "that semi-opalescent, semi-crystalline appearance, caused in flower-petals by a purely structural arrangement of liquid globules or empty cells".
The mantis climbs up the twigs of the plant and stands imitating a flower and waits for her prey patiently. It sways from side to side, soon various small flies land on and around it, attracted by the small black spot on the end of its abdomen which resembles a fly; when a larger dipteran fly, as big as a house fly, landed nearby, the mantis at once seized and ate it. More the orchid mantis's coloration has been shown to be an effective mimic of tropical flowers; the flower mantises include the following species, many of which are popularly kept as pets: List of mantis genera and species Cott, Hugh B.. Adaptive Coloration in Animals. Methuen, London. Gullan, PJ; the Insects: An Outline of Entomology. Wiley. Wickler, Wolfgang. Mimicry in plants and animals. McGraw-Hill, New York
Deroplatys
Deroplatys is a genus of mantis in the tribe Deroplatyini of the subfamily Deroplatyinae of the family Mantidae. They are native to several share the common name dead leaf mantis; the Mantodea Species File lists: There are 4 Deroplatys species that are kept and bred in captivity and they are: Deroplatys lobata Deroplatys desiccata Deroplatys truncata Deroplatys trigonodera List of mantis genera and species Media related to Deroplatys at Wikimedia Commons
Miomantinae
Miomantinae is a subfamily of insects Mantodea the family Mantidae. The species shows similar characteristics and behaviour to other insects of the Mantidae family; the Mantodea Species File lists two tribes: Genus Arria Stal, 1877 Genus Cilnia Stal, 1876 Genus Miomantis Saussure, 1870 Genus Neocilnia Beier, 1930 Genus Paracilnia Werner, 1909 Genus Parasphendale Schulthess-Schildler, 1898 Genus Sphodropoda Stal, 1871 Genus Taumantis Giglio-Tos, 1917 Genus Trachymantis Giglio-Tos, 1917 Genus Zopheromantis Tindale, 1924 Genus Bolivaria Stal, 1877 Genus Carvilia Stal, 1876 Genus Deiphobe Stal, 1877 Genus Deiphobella Giglio-Tos, 1916 Genus Eremoplana Stal, 1871 Genus Euchomena Saussure, 1870 Genus Geomantis Pantel, 1896 Genus Geothespis Giglio-Tos, 1916 Genus Gretella Werner 1923 Genus Indothespis Werner, 1935 Genus Ischnomantis Stal, 1871 Genus Microthespis Werner, 1908 Genus Pararivetina Beier, 1930 Genus Pseudempusa Brunner v.. W. 1893 Genus Rivetina Berland & Chopard, 1922 Genus Rivetinula La Greca, 1977 Genus Solygia Stal, 1877 Genus Teddia Burr, 1899 The only species of this subfamily present in Italy are Geomantis larvoides and Rivetina baetica There are about 28 subfamilies of this species in Australia, they thrive in temperate regions across the country.
They are noticed across temperate areas of New Zealand. Media related to Miomantinae at Wikimedia Commons Data related to Miomantinae at Wikispecies
