Brown quail
The brown quail known as the swamp quail, silver quail and Tasmanian quail, is an Australasian true quail of the family Phasianidae. It is a small, ground-dwelling bird and is native to mainland Australia and Papua New Guinea and has been introduced to New Zealand and Fiji. Widespread and common throughout its large range, the brown quail is evaluated as being of "least concern" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species; the Kunwinjku of western Arnhem Land call this bird Djiribidj or Djirridih, or Meme The brown quail is a plump, stocky bird growing to a length of 17 to 22 centimetres and weight of 75 to 140 grams. The colour is quite variable over the bird's wide range; the male is reddish-brown speckled with black on the head and upper neck and reddish-brown on back and wings. The underparts range from buff or rufous to brown, but always with fine black chevron-shaped barring; the tail is dark brown with yellowish barring. The female is similar but rather paler.
There are small black spots on the shoulder of the female and the upperparts are barred with dark chevron-shaped markings. The voice consists of a variety of shrill calls with which the birds communicate as they move through dense vegetation. One call is the latter note ascending; the brown quail is distributed in agricultural areas, wet grasslands, spinifex savannah, freshwater wetlands across much of New Guinea and the Lesser Sunda Islands as well as in northern, south-eastern and south-western Australia and Tasmania, though absent from arid regions. This species has been introduced to New Zealand. In Australia it is a lowland species but in New Zealand it is found at altitudes up to 1,000 metres and in New Guinea up to 3,700 metres, it was introduced to New Zealand in the 1860s and 1870s and is now present in North Island and certain offshore islands. This introduction, other quail introductions that failed to establish, may have played a part in the demise of the New Zealand quail, an endemic species that became extinct shortly afterwards because of a lack of resistance to some new disease.
The brown quail is a ground-dwelling bird that prefers to run rather than fly. It is found in small groups and feeds on grasses, seeds and small invertebrates. If the group is startled and take to the air, the birds scatter by flying in different directions, regrouping when the danger has passed. Brown quails form breeding pairs in the spring. There is an extended breeding season with clutches of half a dozen or more eggs being laid in a shallow scraped nest lined with grasses on the ground concealed in a grass tussock or shrubby bush; these are incubated by the female for the three-week incubation period. The newly hatched chicks are precocial and are cared for by both parents for a while, with the male taking on the caring role after two weeks to allow the female to start on the next clutch of eggs; the brown quail has a wide range and is common in much of that range. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has assessed its conservation status as being of "least concern". Although the population has not been quantified, may be declining it does not seem to be at such a rate as to warrant listing the species in a more threatened category.
Marchant, S.. J... Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds. Volume 2: Raptors to Lapwings. Oxford University Press: Melbourne. ISBN 0-19-553069-1 BirdLife Species Factsheet
Perdicinae
Perdicinae is a subfamily of birds in the pheasant family, regrouping the partridges, Old World quails, francolins. Although this subfamily was considered monophyletic and separated from the pheasants, tragopans and peafowls till the early 1990s, molecular phylogenies have shown that these two subfamilies constitute only one lineage. For example, some partridges are more affiliated to pheasants, whereas Old World quails and partridges from the Alectoris genus are closer to junglefowls. Perdicinae is a non-migratory Old World group; these are medium-sized birds, are native to Europe, Asia and the Middle East. They are ground-nesting seed-eaters; the subfamily includes the partridges, the snowcocks, the francolins, the spurfowl and the Old World quail
Old World quail
Old World quail is a collective name for several genera of mid-sized birds in the pheasant family Phasianidae. New World quail are found in the Galliformes, but are not in the same family. Buttonquails are not related at all, but are named for their similar appearance, they are presently found in the Turnicidae family in the Charadriiformes, more related to shorebirds and auks. The collective noun for a group of quail is bevy or covey. Old World quail may refer to the following species of Phasianidae: Genus Coturnix Common quail, Coturnix coturnix Japanese quail, Coturnix japonica Stubble quail, Coturnix pectoralis †New Zealand quail, Coturnix novaezelandiae Rain quail, Coturnix coromandelica Harlequin quail, Coturnix delegorguei †Canary Islands quail, Coturnix gomerae Brown quail, Coturnix ypsilophora Blue quail, Coturnix adansonii King quail, Coturnix chinensis Genus Anurophasis Snow Mountain quail, Anurophasis monorthonyx Genus Perdicula Jungle bush quail, Perdicula asiatica Rock bush quail, Perdicula argoondah Painted bush quail, Perdicula erythrorhyncha Manipur bush quail, Perdicula manipurensis Genus Ophrysia Himalayan quail, Ophrysia superciliosa Old World quail are small, plump terrestrial birds.
They are seed eaters, but will take insects and similar small prey. They are capable of short, rapid bursts of flight; some species, such as the Japanese and common quail, fly for long distances. Some quail are farmed in large numbers; the common and Japanese quail are both raised for table meat. They are readily hunted artificially stocked on game farms or to supplement wild populations. Migrating common quail are known to eat some poisonous seeds with no apparent ill effects but store the poison in their body fat, poisoning people who subsequently eat these birds; the dictionary definition of quail at Wiktionary
Marbled wood quail
The marbled wood quail is a species of bird in the New World quail family. It is found in Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Panama, Peru and Venezuela, its natural habitat is tropical moist lowland forests. Adult marbled wood quails grow to a length of between 29 cm; the bill is stout and dark-coloured and the legs and feet are bluish-grey. The iris of the eye is brown and there is orange or red bare skin around the eye; the sexes are similar in appearance. The mantle and neck are greyish-brown, the back and wings are brown with black vermiculations and the rump and upper-tail coverts are indistinctly spotted with paler colour; the underparts are drab brown with some indistinct barring in darker brown. Juvenile birds are similar in appearance to the adults but have reddish-orange bills and non-vermiculated, reddish-brown crests; the marbled wood quail has an extensive distribution in Central America and the northern part of South America. Its range extends from Costa Rica and Panama, where it is feared extinct, to Colombia, Peru, the Guianas and Brazil.
It is a ground-dwelling bird, inhabiting the undergrowth in lowland rainforests and cloud forests, occurring at elevations of up to 900 m in Ecuador, 1,500 m in Colombia and 1,500 m in Venezuela. The marbled wood quail is an elusive bird, moving about in the undergrowth and seen, but its distinctive calls can be heard at dawn and dusk, it sometimes emerges into the open but stays close to fallen trees or scrub to facilitate an easy retreat. On disturbance, it tends to move away on foot, but will burst into flight if necessary, it occurs in small groups that move in single file, foraging through the leaf litter for invertebrates and fallen fruits. Nests are sometimes found at the foot of a tree, with about four white eggs, sometimes spotted with brown, in a shallow scrape concealed under a roof of dead leaves; the total number of marbled wood quails are thought to be decreasing as their forest habitat in the Amazon basin is being cleared to provide grazing land for cattle and agricultural land for Soybean production.
They are to some extent adaptable to living in secondary growth forest, but the increasing road network puts them at risk of increased hunting. The International Union for Conservation of Nature expects the population to dwindle by 25 to 30% over the next three generations of birds and has assessed their conservation status as being "near threatened"
Order (biology)
In biological classification, the order is a taxonomic rank used in the classification of organisms and recognized by the nomenclature codes. Other well-known ranks are life, kingdom, class, family and species, with order fitting in between class and family. An higher rank, may be added directly above order, while suborder would be a lower rank. A taxonomic unit, a taxon, in that rank. In that case the plural is orders. Example: All owls belong to the order StrigiformesWhat does and does not belong to each order is determined by a taxonomist, as is whether a particular order should be recognized at all. There is no exact agreement, with different taxonomists each taking a different position. There are no hard rules that a taxonomist needs to follow in recognizing an order; some taxa are accepted universally, while others are recognised only rarely. For some groups of organisms, consistent suffixes are used to denote; the Latin suffix -formes meaning "having the form of" is used for the scientific name of orders of birds and fishes, but not for those of mammals and invertebrates.
The suffix -ales is for the name of orders of plants and algae. For some clades covered by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, a number of additional classifications are sometimes used, although not all of these are recognised. In their 1997 classification of mammals, McKenna and Bell used two extra levels between superorder and order: "grandorder" and "mirorder". Michael Novacek inserted them at the same position. Michael Benton inserted them between magnorder instead; this position was adopted by others. In botany, the ranks of subclass and suborder are secondary ranks pre-defined as above and below the rank of order. Any number of further ranks can be used as long as they are defined; the superorder rank is used, with the ending -anae, initiated by Armen Takhtajan's publications from 1966 onwards. The order as a distinct rank of biological classification having its own distinctive name was first introduced by the German botanist Augustus Quirinus Rivinus in his classification of plants that appeared in a series of treatises in the 1690s.
Carl Linnaeus was the first to apply it to the division of all three kingdoms of nature in his Systema Naturae. For plants, Linnaeus' orders in the Systema Naturae and the Species Plantarum were artificial, introduced to subdivide the artificial classes into more comprehensible smaller groups; when the word ordo was first used for natural units of plants, in 19th century works such as the Prodromus of de Candolle and the Genera Plantarum of Bentham & Hooker, it indicated taxa that are now given the rank of family. In French botanical publications, from Michel Adanson's Familles naturelles des plantes and until the end of the 19th century, the word famille was used as a French equivalent for this Latin ordo; this equivalence was explicitly stated in the Alphonse De Candolle's Lois de la nomenclature botanique, the precursor of the used International Code of Nomenclature for algae and plants. In the first international Rules of botanical nomenclature from the International Botanical Congress of 1905, the word family was assigned to the rank indicated by the French "famille", while order was reserved for a higher rank, for what in the 19th century had been named a cohors.
Some of the plant families still retain the names of Linnaean "natural orders" or the names of pre-Linnaean natural groups recognised by Linnaeus as orders in his natural classification. Such names are known as descriptive family names. In zoology, the Linnaean orders were used more consistently; that is, the orders in the zoology part of the Systema Naturae refer to natural groups. Some of his ordinal names are still in use. In virology, the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses's virus classification includes fifteen taxa: realm, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species, to be applied for viruses and satellite nucleic acids. There are each ending in the suffix - virales. Biological classification Cladistics Phylogenetics Rank Rank Systematics Taxonomy Virus classification McNeill, J.. R.. R.. L.. S.. F.. F.. H.. J.. International Code of Nomenclature for algae and plants adopted by the Eighteenth International Botanical Congress Melbourne, July 2011. Regnum Vegetabile 154. A. R.
G. Gantner Verlag KG. ISBN 978-3-87429-425-6
Chordate
A chordate is an animal constituting the phylum Chordata. During some period of their life cycle, chordates possess a notochord, a dorsal nerve cord, pharyngeal slits, an endostyle, a post-anal tail: these five anatomical features define this phylum. Chordates are bilaterally symmetric; the Chordata and Ambulacraria together form the superphylum Deuterostomia. Chordates are divided into three subphyla: Vertebrata. There are extinct taxa such as the Vetulicolia. Hemichordata has been presented as a fourth chordate subphylum, but now is treated as a separate phylum: hemichordates and Echinodermata form the Ambulacraria, the sister phylum of the Chordates. Of the more than 65,000 living species of chordates, about half are bony fish that are members of the superclass Osteichthyes. Chordate fossils have been found from as early as the Cambrian explosion, 541 million years ago. Cladistically, vertebrates - chordates with the notochord replaced by a vertebral column during development - are considered to be a subgroup of the clade Craniata, which consists of chordates with a skull.
The Craniata and Tunicata compose the clade Olfactores. Chordates form a phylum of animals that are defined by having at some stage in their lives all of the following anatomical features: A notochord, a stiff rod of cartilage that extends along the inside of the body. Among the vertebrate sub-group of chordates the notochord develops into the spine, in wholly aquatic species this helps the animal to swim by flexing its tail. A dorsal neural tube. In fish and other vertebrates, this develops into the spinal cord, the main communications trunk of the nervous system. Pharyngeal slits; the pharynx is the part of the throat behind the mouth. In fish, the slits are modified to form gills, but in some other chordates they are part of a filter-feeding system that extracts particles of food from the water in which the animals live. Post-anal tail. A muscular tail that extends backwards behind the anus. An endostyle; this is a groove in the ventral wall of the pharynx. In filter-feeding species it produces mucus to gather food particles, which helps in transporting food to the esophagus.
It stores iodine, may be a precursor of the vertebrate thyroid gland. There are soft constraints that separate chordates from certain other biological lineages, but are not part of the formal definition: All chordates are deuterostomes; this means. All chordates are based on a bilateral body plan. All chordates are coelomates, have a fluid filled body cavity called a coelom with a complete lining called peritoneum derived from mesoderm; the following schema is from the third edition of Vertebrate Palaeontology. The invertebrate chordate classes are from Fishes of the World. While it is structured so as to reflect evolutionary relationships, it retains the traditional ranks used in Linnaean taxonomy. Phylum Chordata †Vetulicolia? Subphylum Cephalochordata – Class Leptocardii Clade Olfactores Subphylum Tunicata – Class Ascidiacea Class Thaliacea Class Appendicularia Class Sorberacea Subphylum Vertebrata Infraphylum incertae sedis Cyclostomata Superclass'Agnatha' paraphyletic Class Myxini Class Petromyzontida or Hyperoartia Class †Conodonta Class †Myllokunmingiida Class †Pteraspidomorphi Class †Thelodonti Class †Anaspida Class †Cephalaspidomorphi Infraphylum Gnathostomata Class †Placodermi Class Chondrichthyes Class †Acanthodii Superclass Osteichthyes Class Actinopterygii Class Sarcopterygii Superclass Tetrapoda Class Amphibia Class Sauropsida Class Synapsida Craniates, one of the three subdivisions of chordates, all have distinct skulls.
They include the hagfish. Michael J. Benton commented that "craniates are characterized by their heads, just as chordates, or all deuterostomes, are by their tails". Most craniates are vertebrates; these consist of a series of bony or cartilaginous cylindrical vertebrae with neural arches that protect the spinal cord, with projections that link the vertebrae. However hagfish have incomplete braincases and no vertebrae, are therefore not regarded as vertebrates, but as members of the craniates, the group from which vertebrates are thought to have evolved; however the cladistic exclusion of hagfish from the vertebrates is controversial, as they ma
. Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.
