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.
Geographic coordinate system
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A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system used in geography that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation, to specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection. The invention of a coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Ptolemy credited him with the adoption of longitude and latitude. Ptolemys 2nd-century Geography used the prime meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes recovery of Ptolemys text a little before 1300, in 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911, the latitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the equator, the north pole is 90° N, the south pole is 90° S. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the equator, the plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the longitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. All meridians are halves of great ellipses, which converge at the north and south poles, the prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180°E, the combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. The grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule, the origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km south of Tema, Ghana. To completely specify a location of a feature on, in, or above Earth. Earth is not a sphere, but a shape approximating a biaxial ellipsoid. It is nearly spherical, but has an equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about 0. 3% larger than the radius measured through the poles, the shorter axis approximately coincides with the axis of rotation
4.
Litre
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The litre or liter is an SI accepted metric system unit of volume equal to 1 cubic decimetre,1,000 cubic centimetres or 1/1,000 cubic metre. A cubic decimetre occupies a volume of 10×10×10 centimetres and is equal to one-thousandth of a cubic metre. The original French metric system used the litre as a base unit. The word litre is derived from an older French unit, the litron, whose name came from Greek — where it was a unit of weight, not volume — via Latin, and which equalled approximately 0.831 litres. The litre was also used in subsequent versions of the metric system and is accepted for use with the SI. The spelling used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures is litre, the less common spelling of liter is more predominantly used in American English. One litre of water has a mass of almost exactly one kilogram. Subsequent redefinitions of the metre and kilogram mean that this relationship is no longer exact, a litre is defined as a special name for a cubic decimetre or 10 centimetres ×10 centimetres ×10 centimetres. Hence 1 L ≡0.001 m3 ≡1000 cm3, from 1901 to 1964, the litre was defined as the volume of one kilogram of pure water at maximum density and standard pressure. The kilogram was in turn specified as the mass of a platinum/iridium cylinder held at Sèvres in France and was intended to be of the mass as the 1 litre of water referred to above. It was subsequently discovered that the cylinder was around 28 parts per million too large and thus, during this time, additionally, the mass-volume relationship of water depends on temperature, pressure, purity and isotopic uniformity. In 1964, the definition relating the litre to mass was abandoned in favour of the current one, although the litre is not an official SI unit, it is accepted by the CGPM for use with the SI. CGPM defines the litre and its acceptable symbols, a litre is equal in volume to the millistere, an obsolete non-SI metric unit customarily used for dry measure. The litre is often used in some calculated measurements, such as density. One litre of water has a mass of almost exactly one kilogram when measured at its maximal density, similarly,1 millilitre of water has a mass of about 1 g,1,000 litres of water has a mass of about 1,000 kg. It is now known that density of water depends on the isotopic ratios of the oxygen and hydrogen atoms in a particular sample. The litre, though not an official SI unit, may be used with SI prefixes, the most commonly used derived unit is the millilitre, defined as one-thousandth of a litre, and also often referred to by the SI derived unit name cubic centimetre. It is a commonly used measure, especially in medicine and cooking, Other units may be found in the table below, where the more often used terms are in bold
5.
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
6.
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
7.
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
8.
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
9.
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
Australia
