1.
Townsville
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Townsville is a city on the north-eastern coast of Queensland, Australia. It is in the dry region of Queensland, adjacent to the central section of the Great Barrier Reef. Townsville is Australias largest urban centre north of the Sunshine Coast, such indigenous groups as the Wulgurukaba, Bindal, Girrugubba, Warakamai and Nawagi, among others, originally inhabited the Townsville area. The Wulgurukaba claim to be the owner of the Townsville city area. James Cook visited the Townsville region on his first voyage to Australia in 1770, Cook named nearby Cape Cleveland, Cleveland Bay and Magnetic Island. In 1819, Captain Phillip Parker King and botanist Alan Cunningham were the first Europeans to record a local landing. In 1846, James Morrill was shipwrecked from the Peruvian, living in the Townsville area among the Bindal people for 17 years before being found by white men and returned to Brisbane. The Burdekin Rivers seasonal flooding made the establishment of a north of the river essential to the nascent inland cattle industry. Balls party reached the Ross Creek in April 1864 and established a camp below the spur of Melton Hill. The first party of settlers, led by W. A. Ross, in 1866 Robert Towns visited for three days, his first and only visit. He agreed to provide ongoing assistance to the new settlement. Townsville was declared a municipality in February 1866, with John Melton Black elected as its first Mayor, Townsville developed rapidly as the major port and service centre for the Cape River, Gilbert, Ravenswood, Etheridge and Charters Towers goldfields. Regional pastoral and sugar industries also expanded and flourished, Townsvilles population was 4,000 people in 1882 and grew to 13,000 by 1891. With Brisbane, in 1902 Townsville was proclaimed a City under the Local Authorities Act, the foundation stone of the Townsville Cenotaph was laid in Strand Park on 19 July 1923. It was unveiled on 25 April 1924 by the Queensland Governor, the rural land surrounding the city was initially managed by the Thuringowa Road Board, which eventually became the Shire of Thuringowa. The shire ceded land several times to support Townsvilles expansion, in 1986 the Shire became incorporated as a city, governed by the Thuringowa City Council. The cities of Townsville and Thuringowa were amalgamated into the new Townsville City Council in March 2008, with the introduction of the White Australia policy, the demand for Japanese workers decreased, causing the consulate to finally close in 1908. During World War II, the city was host to more than 50,000 American and Australian troops and air crew, a large United States Armed Forces contingent supported the war effort from seven airfields and other bases around the city and in the region
2.
Australia
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Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the worlds sixth-largest country by total area, the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and East Timor to the north, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east, and New Zealand to the south-east. Australias capital is Canberra, and its largest urban area is Sydney, for about 50,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians, who spoke languages classifiable into roughly 250 groups. The population grew steadily in subsequent decades, and by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored, on 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. Australia has since maintained a liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy comprising six states. The population of 24 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard, Australia has the worlds 13th-largest economy and ninth-highest per capita income. With the second-highest human development index globally, the country highly in quality of life, health, education, economic freedom. The name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis a name used for putative lands in the southern hemisphere since ancient times, the Dutch adjectival form Australische was used in a Dutch book in Batavia in 1638, to refer to the newly discovered lands to the south. On 12 December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted, in 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially as Australia. The first official published use of the term Australia came with the 1830 publication of The Australia Directory and these first inhabitants may have been ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. The Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, were originally horticulturists, the northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited sporadically by fishermen from Maritime Southeast Asia. The first recorded European sighting of the Australian mainland, and the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent, are attributed to the Dutch. The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken captained by Dutch navigator, Willem Janszoon. He sighted the coast of Cape York Peninsula in early 1606, the Dutch charted the whole of the western and northern coastlines and named the island continent New Holland during the 17th century, but made no attempt at settlement. William Dampier, an English explorer and privateer, landed on the north-west coast of New Holland in 1688, in 1770, James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast, which he named New South Wales and claimed for Great Britain. The first settlement led to the foundation of Sydney, and the exploration, a British settlement was established in Van Diemens Land, now known as Tasmania, in 1803, and it became a separate colony in 1825. The United Kingdom formally claimed the part of Western Australia in 1828. Separate colonies were carved from parts of New South Wales, South Australia in 1836, Victoria in 1851, the Northern Territory was founded in 1911 when it was excised from South Australia
3.
Coral reef
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Coral reefs are diverse underwater ecosystems held together by calcium carbonate structures secreted by corals. Coral reefs are built by colonies of tiny animals found in waters that contain few nutrients. Most coral reefs are built from stony corals, which in turn consist of polyps that cluster in groups, the polyps belong to a group of animals known as Cnidaria, which also includes sea anemones and jellyfish. Unlike sea anemones, corals secrete hard carbonate exoskeletons which support, most reefs grow best in warm, shallow, clear, sunny and agitated waters. Often called rainforests of the sea, shallow coral reefs form some of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth, paradoxically, coral reefs flourish even though they are surrounded by ocean waters that provide few nutrients. They are most commonly found at depths in tropical waters. Coral reefs deliver ecosystem services to tourism, fisheries and shoreline protection, the annual global economic value of coral reefs is estimated between US$29. 8-375 billion. However, coral reefs are fragile ecosystems, partly because they are sensitive to water temperature. Most of the coral reefs we can see today were formed after the last glacial period when melting ice caused the sea level to rise and this means that most modern coral reefs are less than 10,000 years old. As communities established themselves on the shelves, the reefs grew upwards, Reefs that rose too slowly could become drowned reefs. They are covered by so much water there was insufficient light. Coral reefs are found in the sea away from continental shelves, around oceanic islands. The vast majority of islands are volcanic in origin. The few exceptions have tectonic origins where plate movements have lifted the deep ocean floor on the surface. In 1842 in his first monograph, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, Charles Darwin set out his theory of the formation of atoll reefs and he theorized uplift and subsidence of the Earths crust under the oceans formed the atolls. Darwin’s theory sets out a sequence of three stages in atoll formation and it starts with a fringing reef forming around an extinct volcanic island as the island and ocean floor subsides. As the subsidence continues, the reef becomes a barrier reef. Darwin predicted that underneath each lagoon would be a bed rock base, where the level of the underlying earth allows, the corals grow around the coast to form what he called fringing reefs, and can eventually grow out from the shore to become a barrier reef
4.
Aquarium
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An aquarium is a vivarium of any size having at least one transparent side in which water-dwelling plants or animals are kept and displayed. Fishkeepers use aquaria to keep fish, invertebrates, amphibians, aquatic reptiles such as turtles, the term, coined by English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, combines the Latin root aqua, meaning water, with the suffix -arium, meaning a place for relating to. An aquarist owns fish or maintains an aquarium, typically constructed of glass or high-strength acrylic, cuboid aquaria are also known as fish tanks or simply tanks, while bowl-shaped aquaria are also known as fish bowls. Size can range from a glass bowl to immense public aquaria. Specialized equipment maintains appropriate water quality and other characteristics suitable for the aquariums residents, in the Roman Empire, the first fish to be brought indoors was the sea barbel, which was kept under guest beds in small tanks made of marble. Introduction of glass panes around the year 50 AD allowed Romans to replace one wall of marble tanks, leonhard Baldner, who wrote Vogel-, Fisch- und Tierbuch in 1666, maintained weather loaches and newts. In 1832, Jeanne Villepreux-Power, a pioneering French marine biologist, in 1836, soon after his invention of the Wardian case, Dr. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward proposed to use his tanks for tropical animals. In 1841 he did so, though only with aquatic plants, however, he soon housed real animals. In 1838, Félix Dujardin noted owning a saltwater aquarium, though he did not use the term, in 1846, Anne Thynne maintained stony corals and seaweed for almost three years, and was credited as the creator of the first balanced marine aquarium in London. English chemist Robert Warington experimented with a 13-gallon container, which contained goldfish, eelgrass and he published his findings in 1850 in the Chemical Societys journal. The keeping of fish in an aquarium became a popular hobby, in the United Kingdom, it became popular after ornate aquaria in cast-iron frames were featured at the Great Exhibition of 1851. In 1853, the craze was launched in England by Philip Henry Gosse who created and stocked the first public aquarium in the London Zoo which came to be known as the Fish House. Gosse coined the word aquarium, opting for this term in 1854 in his book The Aquarium, in this book, Gosse primarily discussed saltwater aquaria. In the 1850s, the became a fad in the United Kingdom. Tank designs and techniques for maintaining water quality were developed by Warington, edward Edwards developed these glass-fronted aquaria in his 1858 patent for a dark-water-chamber slope-back tank, with water slowly circulating to a reservoir beneath. Germans soon rivaled the British in their interest, in 1854, an anonymous author had two articles published about the saltwater aquaria of the United Kingdom, Die Gartenlaube entitled Der Ocean auf dem Tische. However, in 1856, Der See im Glase was published, discussing freshwater aquaria, during the 1870s, some of the first aquarist societies were appearing in Germany. Published in 1858, Henry D. Butlers The Family Aquarium was one of the first books written in the United States solely about the aquarium
5.
Coral
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Corals are marine invertebrates in the class Anthozoa of phylum Cnidaria. They typically live in colonies of many identical individual polyps. The group includes the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans, a coral group is a colony of myriad genetically identical polyps. Each polyp is an animal typically only a few millimeters in diameter. A set of tentacles surround a central mouth opening, an exoskeleton is excreted near the base. Over many generations, the colony creates a large skeleton that is characteristic of the species. Individual heads grow by reproduction of polyps. Corals also breed sexually by spawning, polyps of the same species release gametes simultaneously over a period of one to several nights around a full moon and these are commonly known as zooxanthellae and the corals that contain them are zooxanthellate corals. Such corals require sunlight and grow in clear, shallow water, other corals do not rely on zooxanthellae and can live in much deeper water, with the cold-water genus Lophelia surviving as deep as 3,000 metres. Some have been found on the Darwin Mounds, north-west of Cape Wrath, Corals have also been found as far north as off the coast of Washington State and the Aleutian Islands. In his Scala Naturae, Aristotle classified corals as zoophyta, animals that had characteristics of plants and were therefore hypothetically in between animals and plants, the Persian polymath Al-Biruni classified sponges and corals as animals, arguing that they respond to touch. The phylogeny of Anthozoans is not clearly understood and a number of different models have been proposed, within the Hexacorallia, the sea anemones, coral anemones and stony corals may constitute a monophyletic grouping united by their eight-fold symmetry and cnidocyte trait. The Octocorallia appears to be monophyletic, and primitive members of this group may have been stolonate, the cladogram presented here comes from a 2014 study by Stampar et al. which was based on the divergence of mitochondrial DNA within the group and on nuclear markers. Corals are classified in the class Anthozoa of the phylum Cnidaria and they are divided into three subclasses, Hexacorallia, Octocorallia, and Ceriantharia. The Hexacorallia include the stony corals, the sea anemones and the zoanthids and these groups have polyps that generally have 6-fold symmetry. The Octocorallia include blue coral, soft corals, sea pens and these groups have polyps with 8-fold symmetry, each polyp having eight tentacles and eight mesenteries. Fire corals are not true corals, being in the order Anthomedusa of the class Hydrozoa, Corals are sessile animals in the class Anthozoa and differ from most other cnidarians in not having a medusa stage in their life cycle. The body unit of the animal is a polyp, most corals are colonial, the initial polyp budding to produce another and the colony gradually developing from this small start
6.
Fish
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A fish is any member of a group of animals that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits. They form a group to the tunicates, together forming the olfactores. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous, tetrapods emerged within lobe-finned fishes, so cladistically they are fish as well. However, traditionally fish are rendered obsolete or paraphyletic by excluding the tetrapods, because in this manner the term fish is defined negatively as a paraphyletic group, it is not considered a formal taxonomic grouping in systematic biology. The traditional term pisces is considered a typological, but not a phylogenetic classification, the earliest organisms that can be classified as fish were soft-bodied chordates that first appeared during the Cambrian period. Although they lacked a true spine, they possessed notochords which allowed them to be more agile than their invertebrate counterparts, fish would continue to evolve through the Paleozoic era, diversifying into a wide variety of forms. Many fish of the Paleozoic developed external armor that protected them from predators, the first fish with jaws appeared in the Silurian period, after which many became formidable marine predators rather than just the prey of arthropods. Fish are abundant in most bodies of water and they can be found in nearly all aquatic environments, from high mountain streams to the abyssal and even hadal depths of the deepest oceans. With 33,100 described species, fish exhibit greater species diversity than any group of vertebrates. Fish are an important resource for humans worldwide, especially as food, commercial and subsistence fishers hunt fish in wild fisheries or farm them in ponds or in cages in the ocean. They are also caught by fishers, kept as pets, raised by fishkeepers. Fish have had a role in culture through the ages, serving as deities, religious symbols, fish do not represent a monophyletic group, and therefore the evolution of fish is not studied as a single event. Early fish from the record are represented by a group of small, jawless. Jawless fish lineages are mostly extinct, an extant clade, the lampreys may approximate ancient pre-jawed fish. The first jaws are found in Placodermi fossils, the diversity of jawed vertebrates may indicate the evolutionary advantage of a jawed mouth. It is unclear if the advantage of a hinged jaw is greater biting force, improved respiration, fish may have evolved from a creature similar to a coral-like sea squirt, whose larvae resemble primitive fish in important ways. The first ancestors of fish may have kept the form into adulthood. Fish are a group, that is, any clade containing all fish also contains the tetrapods
7.
Starfish
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Starfish or sea stars are star-shaped echinoderms belonging to the class Asteroidea. Common usage frequently finds these names being applied to ophiuroids. About 1,500 species of starfish occur on the seabed in all the worlds oceans and they are found from the intertidal zone down to abyssal depths,6,000 m below the surface. They typically have a disc and five arms, though some species have a larger number of arms. The aboral or upper surface may be smooth, granular or spiny, many species are brightly coloured in various shades of red or orange, while others are blue, grey or brown. Starfish have tube feet operated by a system and a mouth at the centre of the oral or lower surface. They are opportunistic feeders and are predators on benthic invertebrates. Several species have specialized feeding behaviours including eversion of their stomachs and they have complex life cycles and can reproduce both sexually and asexually. Most can regenerate damaged parts or lost arms and they can shed arms as a means of defence, the Asteroidea occupy several significant ecological roles. Starfish, such as the sea star and the reef sea star, have become widely known as examples of the keystone species concept in ecology. The fossil record for starfish is ancient, dating back to the Ordovician around 450 million years ago, only the ossicles and spines of the animal are likely to be preserved, making remains hard to locate. With their appealing symmetrical shape, starfish have played a part in literature, legend, design and they are sometimes collected as curios, used in design or as logos, and in some cultures, despite possible toxicity, they are eaten. The scientific name Asteroidea was given to starfish by the French zoologist de Blainville in 1830 and it is derived from the Greek aster, ἀστήρ and the Greek eidos, εἶδος. The class Asteroidea belongs to the phylum Echinodermata, as well as the starfish, the echinoderms include sea urchins, sand dollars, brittle and basket stars, sea cucumbers and crinoids. The larvae of echinoderms have bilateral symmetry, but during metamorphosis this is replaced with radial symmetry, adult echinoderms are characterized by having a water vascular system with external tube feet and a calcareous endoskeleton consisting of ossicles connected by a mesh of collagen fibres. Starfish are included in the subphylum Asterozoa, the characteristics of which include a flattened, star-shaped body as adults consisting of a central disc, the subphylum includes the two classes of Asteroidea, the starfish, and Ophiuroidea, the brittle stars and basket stars. The starfish are a large and diverse class with about 1,500 living species, there are seven extant orders, Brisingida, Forcipulatida, Notomyotida, Paxillosida, Spinulosida, Valvatida and Velatida and two extinct ones, Calliasterellidae and Trichasteropsida. Most starfish have five arms that radiate from a central disc, Luidia ciliaris has seven arms, members of the Solasteridae have ten to fifteen while the Antarctic Labidiaster annulatus can have up to fifty
8.
Sea cucumber
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Sea cucumbers are echinoderms from the class Holothuroidea. They are marine animals with a skin and an elongated body containing a single. Sea cucumbers are found on the sea floor worldwide, the number of holothurian species worldwide is about 1,717 with the greatest number being in the Asia Pacific region. Many of these are gathered for consumption and some species are cultivated in aquaculture systems. The harvested product is referred to as trepang, bêche-de-mer or balate. Sea cucumbers serve a role in the marine ecosystem as they help recycle nutrients, breaking down detritus. Like all echinoderms, sea cucumbers have an endoskeleton just below the skin, in some species these can sometimes be enlarged to flattened plates, forming an armour. In pelagic species such as Pelagothuria natatrix, the skeleton is absent, the sea cucumbers are named after their resemblance to the fruit of the cucumber plant. Most sea cucumbers, as their name suggests, have a soft and cylindrical body, more or less lengthened, rounded off and occasionally fat in the extremities, and generally without solid appendages. Their shape ranges from almost spherical for sea apples to serpent-like for Apodida or the classic sausage-shape, the mouth is surrounded by tentacles, which can be pulled back inside the animal. Holothurians measure generally between 10 and 30 centimeters long, with extremes of some millimeters for Rhabdomolgus ruber and up to more than 3 meters for Synapta maculata. The largest American species, Holothuria floridana, which abounds just below low-water mark on the Florida reefs, has a volume of well over 500 cubic centimeters, and 25–30 cm long. Most possess five rows of feet, but Apodida lacks these and moves by crawling. The podia on the dorsal surface generally have no locomotive role, at one of the extremities opens a rounded mouth, generally surrounded with a crown of tentacles which can be very complex in some species, the anus is postero-dorsal. Holothurians do not look like other echinoderms at first glance, because of their tubular body, furthermore, the fivefold symmetry, classical for echinoderms, although preserved structurally, is doubled here by a bilateral symmetry which makes them look like chordates. However, a symmetry is still visible in some species through five radii. There is thus no oral or aboral face as for sea stars and other echinoderms, but the stands on one of its sides. A remarkable feature of animals is the catch collagen that forms their body wall
9.
Brittle star
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Brittle stars or ophiuroids are echinoderms in the class Ophiuroidea closely related to starfish. They crawl across the sea using their flexible arms for locomotion. The ophiuroids generally have five long, slender, whip-like arms which may reach up to 60 cm in length on the largest specimens and they are also known as serpent stars, the New Latin class name Ophiuroidea is derived from the Ancient Greek ὄφις, meaning serpent. The Ophiuroidea contain two clades, Ophiurida and Euryalida. Many of the ophiuroids are rarely encountered in the shallow depths normally visited by humans. Over 2,000 species of brittle stars live today, more than 1200 of these species are found in deep waters, greater than 200 m deep. The ophiuroids diverged in the Early Ordovician, about 500 million years ago, ophiuroids can be found today in all of the major marine provinces, from the poles to the tropics. In fact, crinoids, holothurians, and ophiuroids live at depths from 16–35 m, basket stars are usually confined to the deeper parts of this range. Ophiuroids are known even from abyssal depths, however, brittle stars are also common, if cryptic, members of reef communities, where they hide under rocks and even within other living organisms. A few ophiuroid species can tolerate brackish water, an ability otherwise almost unknown among echinoderms. A brittle stars skeleton is made up of embedded ossicles, the roughly 1900 extant species are placed in 230 genera, grouped in the three orders currently living, Oegophiurida, Phrynophiurida, and Ophiurida. Also, a Paleozoic order exists, the Stenurida, the relationships among ophiuroids and all other echinoderms provide an enduring problem in invertebrate evolution. Developmental and other based on modern organisms imply that asteroids and ophiuroids are not closely related within the echinoderms. Stenurid morphology, in contrast, suggests a common ancestry for the two, the nature of the ambulacral plates is important, but even their general form is transitional. This is a Paleozoic order, bearing a double row of plates that abut across the arm axis either directly opposite one another or slightly offset, in contrast, modern ophiuroids have a single series of axial arm plates termed vertebrae. In stenurids, as in modern ophiuroids, lateral plates are present at the sides of ambulacrals, stenurids lack the dorsal and ventral arm shields that are found in most ophiuroids. Proximal ambulacral pairs can be separated, forming a buccal slit. The arms of some stenurids are slender and flexible, but those of others are broad, the central disk varies from little larger than the juncture of the arms to an expansion that extends most of the length of the arms
10.
Crinoid
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Crinoids are marine animals that make up the class Crinoidea of the echinoderms. The name comes from the Greek word krinon, a lily and they live in both shallow water and in depths as great as 9,000 meters. Those crinoids which, in their form, are attached to the sea bottom by a stalk are commonly called sea lilies. The unstalked forms are called feather stars or comatulids, crinoids are characterised by a mouth on the top surface that is surrounded by feeding arms. They have a U-shaped gut, and their anus is located next to the mouth, although the basic echinoderm pattern of fivefold symmetry can be recognised, most crinoids have many more than five arms. Crinoids usually have a used to attach themselves to a substrate. There are only about 600 extant crinoid species, but they were more abundant. Some thick limestone beds dating to the mid- to late-Paleozoic are almost entirely made up of disarticulated crinoid fragments, crinoids comprise three basic sections, the stem, the calyx, and the arms. The stem is composed of highly porous ossicles which are connected by ligamentary tissue, the calyx contains the crinoids digestive and reproductive organs, and the mouth is located at the top of the dorsal cup, while the anus is located peripheral to it. The majority of living crinoids are free-swimming and have only a vestigial stalk, in those deep-sea species that still retain a stalk, it may reach up to 1 metre in length, although it is usually much smaller. The base of the consists of a disc-like sucker, which. The stalk is lined by small cirri. Like other echinoderms, crinoids have pentaradial symmetry, the aboral surface of the body is studded with plates of calcium carbonate, forming an endoskeleton similar to that in starfish and sea urchins. These make the calyx somewhat cup-shaped, and there are few, if any, the upper surface, or tegmen, is divided into five ambulacral areas, including a deep groove from which the tube feet project, and five interambulacral areas between them. The anus, unusually for echinoderms, is found on the surface as the mouth. The ambulacral grooves extend onto the arms, which thus have tube feet along their inner surfaces, primitively, crinoids had only five arms, but in most living species these are divided into two, giving ten arms in total. In most living species, especially the free-swimming feather stars, the arms branch several times, the arms are jointed, and lined by smaller feather-like appendages, or pinnules, which also include tube feet. Crinoids feed by filtering small particles of food from the sea water with their feather like arms, the tube feet are covered with a sticky mucus that traps any food that floats past
11.
Snail
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Snail is a common name that is applied most often to land snails, terrestrial pulmonate gastropod molluscs. However, the common name snail is also applied to most of the members of the molluscan class Gastropoda that have a shell that is large enough for the animal to retract completely into. When the word snail is used in this most general sense, it not just land snails but also thousands of species of sea snails. Occasionally a few other molluscs that are not actually gastropods, such as the Monoplacophora, snail-like animals that naturally lack a shell, or have only an internal shell, are mostly called slugs, and land snails that have only a very small shell are often called semi-slugs. Even a few species have lungs. Snails can be found in a wide range of environments, including ditches, deserts. Although land snails may be familiar to laymen, marine snails constitute the majority of snail species, and have much greater diversity. Numerous kinds of snail can also be found in fresh water, most snails have thousands of microscopic tooth-like structures located on a banded ribbon-like tongue called a radula. The radula works like a file, ripping food into small pieces, many snails are herbivorous, eating plants or rasping algae from surfaces with their radulae, though a few land species and many marine species are omnivores or predatory carnivores. Several species of the genus Achatina and related genera are known as giant African land snails, some grow to 15 in from snout to tail, and weigh 1 kg. The largest living species of sea snail is Syrinx aruanus, its shell can measure up to 90 cm in length, and the whole animal with the shell can weigh up to 18 kg. The snail Lymnaea makes decisions by using two types of neuron, one deciding whether the snail is hungry, and the other deciding whether there is food in the vicinity. Named Gee Geronimo, this snail was owned by Christopher Hudson of Hove, East Sussex, UK, gastropods that lack a conspicuous shell are commonly called slugs rather than snails. Some species of slug have a red shell, some have only a vestige that serves mainly as a calcium repository. Other than that there is little difference between slugs and snails. There are however important differences in habitats and behavior, slugs squeeze themselves into confined spaces such as under loose bark on trees or under stone slabs, logs or wooden boards lying on the ground. In such retreats they are in danger from either predators or desiccation. Slugs as a group are far from monophyletic, biologically speaking slug is a term of convenience with little taxonomic significance, the reduction or loss of the shell has evolved many times independently within several very different lineages of gastropods
12.
Worm
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Worms /ˈwɜːrm/ are many different distantly related animals that typically have a long cylindrical tube-like body and no limbs. Various types of worm occupy a variety of parasitic niches. Free-living worm species do not live on land, but instead live in marine or freshwater environments, in biology, worm refers to an obsolete taxon, vermes, used by Carolus Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck for all non-arthropod invertebrate animals, now seen to be paraphyletic. The name stems from the Old English word wyrm, most animals called worms are invertebrates, but the term is also used for the amphibian caecilians and the slow worm Anguis, a legless burrowing lizard. Invertebrate animals commonly called worms include annelids, nematodes, platyhelminthes, marine worms, marine Chaetognatha, priapulid worms. Worms may also be called helminths, particularly in medical terminology when referring to parasitic worms, when an animal or human is said to have worms, it means that it is infested with parasitic worms, typically roundworms or tapeworms. Lungworm is also a parasitic worm found in various animal species such as fish. Worms can be divided into groups, but are still technically decomposers. The first of these, Platyhelminthes, includes the flatworms, tapeworms and they have a flat, ribbon- or leaf-shaped body with a pair of eyes at the front. The second group contains the threadworms, roundworms, and hookworms, threadworms may be microscopic, such as the vinegar eelworm, or more than 1 metre long. They are found in earth, moss, decaying substances, fresh water. The Guinea worm, for example, gets under the skin of the feet, the third group consists of the segmented worms, with bodies divided into segments, or rings. Among these are the earthworms and the worms of the sea. In earlier taxonomic classification, all the above were included in the now obsolete group Vermes, familiar worms include the earthworms, members of phylum Annelida. Other invertebrate groups may be called worms, especially colloquially, in particular, many unrelated insect larvae are called worms, such as the railroad worm, woodworm, glowworm, bloodworm, inchworm, mealworm, silkworm, and wooly bear worm. Worms may also be called helminths, particularly in medical terminology when referring to parasitic worms, hence helminthology is the study of parasitic worms. When a human or an animal, such as a dog or horse, is said to have worms, it means that it is infested with parasitic worms, deworming is a method to kill off the worms that have infected a human or animal by giving anthelmintic drugs. Ringworm is not a worm at all, but a skin fungus, wurm, or wyrm was the Old English term for carnivorous reptiles, and mythical dragons
Australia
