1.
Taxonomy (biology)
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Taxonomy is the science of defining groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics and giving names to those groups. The exact definition of taxonomy varies from source to source, but the core of the remains, the conception, naming. There is some disagreement as to whether biological nomenclature is considered a part of taxonomy, the broadest meaning of taxonomy is used here. The word taxonomy was introduced in 1813 by Candolle, in his Théorie élémentaire de la botanique, the term alpha taxonomy is primarily used today to refer to the discipline of finding, describing, and naming taxa, particularly species. In earlier literature, the term had a different meaning, referring to morphological taxonomy, ideals can, it may be said, never be completely realized. They have, however, a value of acting as permanent stimulants. Some of us please ourselves by thinking we are now groping in a beta taxonomy, turrill thus explicitly excludes from alpha taxonomy various areas of study that he includes within taxonomy as a whole, such as ecology, physiology, genetics, and cytology. He further excludes phylogenetic reconstruction from alpha taxonomy, thus, Ernst Mayr in 1968 defined beta taxonomy as the classification of ranks higher than species. This activity is what the term denotes, it is also referred to as beta taxonomy. How species should be defined in a group of organisms gives rise to practical and theoretical problems that are referred to as the species problem. The scientific work of deciding how to define species has been called microtaxonomy, by extension, macrotaxonomy is the study of groups at higher taxonomic ranks, from subgenus and above only, than species. While some descriptions of taxonomic history attempt to date taxonomy to ancient civilizations, earlier works were primarily descriptive, and focused on plants that were useful in agriculture or medicine. There are a number of stages in scientific thinking. Early taxonomy was based on criteria, the so-called artificial systems. Later came systems based on a complete consideration of the characteristics of taxa, referred to as natural systems, such as those of de Jussieu, de Candolle and Bentham. The publication of Charles Darwins Origin of Species led to new ways of thinking about classification based on evolutionary relationships and this was the concept of phyletic systems, from 1883 onwards. This approach was typified by those of Eichler and Engler, the advent of molecular genetics and statistical methodology allowed the creation of the modern era of phylogenetic systems based on cladistics, rather than morphology alone. Taxonomy has been called the worlds oldest profession, and naming and classifying our surroundings has likely been taking place as long as mankind has been able to communicate
2.
Animal
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Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia. The animal kingdom emerged as a clade within Apoikozoa as the group to the choanoflagellates. Animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and independently at some point in their lives and their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later in their lives. All animals are heterotrophs, they must ingest other organisms or their products for sustenance, most known animal phyla appeared in the fossil record as marine species during the Cambrian explosion, about 542 million years ago. Animals can be divided broadly into vertebrates and invertebrates, vertebrates have a backbone or spine, and amount to less than five percent of all described animal species. They include fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, the remaining animals are the invertebrates, which lack a backbone. These include molluscs, arthropods, annelids, nematodes, flatworms, cnidarians, ctenophores, the study of animals is called zoology. The word animal comes from the Latin animalis, meaning having breath, the biological definition of the word refers to all members of the kingdom Animalia, encompassing creatures as diverse as sponges, jellyfish, insects, and humans. Aristotle divided the world between animals and plants, and this was followed by Carl Linnaeus, in the first hierarchical classification. In Linnaeuss original scheme, the animals were one of three kingdoms, divided into the classes of Vermes, Insecta, Pisces, Amphibia, Aves, and Mammalia. Since then the last four have all been subsumed into a single phylum, in 1874, Ernst Haeckel divided the animal kingdom into two subkingdoms, Metazoa and Protozoa. The protozoa were later moved to the kingdom Protista, leaving only the metazoa, thus Metazoa is now considered a synonym of Animalia. Animals have several characteristics that set apart from other living things. Animals are eukaryotic and multicellular, which separates them from bacteria and they are heterotrophic, generally digesting food in an internal chamber, which separates them from plants and algae. They are also distinguished from plants, algae, and fungi by lacking cell walls. All animals are motile, if only at life stages. In most animals, embryos pass through a stage, which is a characteristic exclusive to animals. With a few exceptions, most notably the sponges and Placozoa and these include muscles, which are able to contract and control locomotion, and nerve tissues, which send and process signals
3.
Chordate
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Chordates are deuterostomes, as during the embryo development stage the anus forms before the mouth. They are also bilaterally symmetric coelomates, in the case of vertebrate chordates, the notochord is usually replaced by a vertebral column during development, and they may have body plans organized via segmentation. There are also additional extinct taxa, the Vertebrata are sometimes considered as a subgroup of the clade Craniata, consisting of chordates with a skull, the Craniata and Tunicata compose the clade Olfactores. Of the more than 65,000 living species of chordates, the worlds largest and fastest animals, the blue whale and peregrine falcon respectively, are chordates, as are humans. Fossil chordates are known from at least as early as the Cambrian explosion, Hemichordata, which includes the acorn worms, has been presented as a fourth chordate subphylum, but it now is usually treated as a separate phylum. The Hemichordata, along with the Echinodermata, form the Ambulacraria, the Chordata and Ambulacraria form the superphylum Deuterostomia, composed of the deuterostomes. Attempts to work out the relationships of the chordates have produced several hypotheses. All of the earliest chordate fossils have found in the Early Cambrian Chengjiang fauna. Because the fossil record of early chordates is poor, only molecular phylogenetics offers a prospect of dating their emergence. However, the use of molecular phylogenetics for dating evolutionary transitions is controversial and it has also proved difficult to produce a detailed classification within the living chordates. Attempts to produce family trees shows that many of the traditional classes are paraphyletic. While this has been known since the 19th century, an insistence on only monophyletic taxa has resulted in vertebrate classification being in a state of flux. Although the name Chordata is attributed to William Bateson, it was already in prevalent use by 1880, ernst Haeckel described a taxon comprising tunicates, cephalochordates, and vertebrates in 1866. Though he used the German vernacular form, it is allowed under the ICZN code because of its subsequent latinization, among the vertebrate sub-group of chordates the notochord develops into the spine, and in wholly aquatic species this helps the animal to swim by flexing its tail. In fish and other vertebrates, this develops into the spinal cord, the pharynx is the part of the throat immediately behind the mouth. In fish, the slits are modified to form gills, a muscular tail that extends backwards behind the anus. This is a groove in the wall of the pharynx. In filter-feeding species it produces mucus to gather food particles, which helps in transporting food to the esophagus and it also stores iodine, and may be a precursor of the vertebrate thyroid gland
4.
Actinopterygii
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Actinopterygii /ˌæktᵻnˌɒptəˈrɪdʒi. aɪ/, or the ray-finned fishes, constitute a class or subclass of the bony fishes. These actinopterygian fin rays attach directly to the proximal or basal skeletal elements, the radials, numerically, actinopterygians are the dominant class of vertebrates, comprising nearly 99% of the over 30,000 species of fish. They are ubiquitous throughout freshwater and marine environments from the sea to the highest mountain streams. Extant species can range in size from Paedocypris, at 8 mm, to the ocean sunfish, at 2,300 kg. Ray-finned fishes occur in variant forms. The main features of a typical ray-finned fish are shown in the diagram at the left. In nearly all ray-finned fish, the sexes are separate, development then proceeds with a free-swimming larval stage. However other patterns of ontogeny exist, with one of the commonest being sequential hermaphroditism, in most cases this involves protogyny, fish starting life as females and converting to males at some stage, triggered by some internal or external factor. This may be advantageous as females become less prolific as they age while male fecundity increases with age, protandry, where a fish converts from male to female, is much less common than protogyny. Most families use external rather than internal fertilization, of the oviparous teleosts, most do not provide parental care. Viviparity is relatively rare and is found in about 6% of teleost species, male territoriality preadapts a species for evolving male parental care. There are a few examples of fish that self-fertilise, the mangrove rivulus is an amphibious, simultaneous hermaphrodite, producing both eggs and spawn and having internal fertilisation. This mode of reproduction may be related to the habit of spending long periods out of water in the mangrove forests it inhabits. Males are occasionally produced at temperatures below 19 °C and can fertilise eggs that are spawned by the female. This maintains genetic variability in a species that is otherwise highly inbred, the earliest known fossil actinopterygiian is Andreolepis hedei, dating back 420 million years. Remains have been found in Russia, Sweden, and Estonia, actinopterygians are divided into the subclasses Chondrostei and Neopterygii. The Neopterygii, in turn, are divided into the infraclasses Holostei and Teleostei, during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic the teleosts in particular diversified widely, and as a result, 96% of all known fish species are teleosts. The cladogram shows the groups of actinopterygians and their relationship to the terrestrial vertebrates that evolved from a related group of fish
5.
Cypriniformes
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Cypriniformes is an order of ray-finned fish, including the carps, minnows, loaches and relatives. This order contains 11-12 families, over 400 genera, and more than 4,250 species, with new species being described every few months or so and they are most diverse in southeastern Asia, and are entirely absent from Australia and South America. Their closest living relatives are the Characiformes, the Gymnotiformes and the Siluriformes, like other orders of the Ostariophysi, fishes of cypriniformes possess a Weberian apparatus. They differ from most of their relatives in having only a dorsal fin on their back, further differences are the Cypriniformes unique kinethmoid, a small median bone in the snout, and the lack of teeth in the mouth. Instead, they have convergent structures called pharyngeal teeth in the throat, while other groups of fish, such as cichlids, also possess pharyngeal teeth, the cypriniformes teeth grind against a chewing pad on the base of the skull, instead of an upper pharyngeal jaw. The most notable family placed here is Cyprinidae which make up two-thirds of the orders diversity and this is one of the largest families of fish, and is widely distributed across Africa, Eurasia, and North America. Most species are freshwater inhabitants, but a considerable number are found in brackish water, such as roach. At least one species is found in saltwater, the Pacific redfin, brackish water and marine cyprinids are invariably anadromous, swimming upstream into rivers to spawn. Sometimes separated as family Psilorhynchidae, they seem to be specially-adapted fishes of Cyprinidae, Balitoridae and Gyrinocheilidae are families of mountain stream fishes feeding on algae and small invertebrates. They are found only in tropical and subtropical Asia, while the former are a speciose group, the latter contain only a handful of species. The suckers are found in temperate North America and eastern Asia and these large fishes are similar to carps in appearance and ecology. Members of Cobitidae common across Eurasia and parts of North Africa, historically these included all the forms now placed in the superorder Ostariophysi except the catfish, which were placed in the order Siluriformes. By this definition, the Cypriniformes were paraphyletic, so recently the orders Gonorhynchiformes, Characiformes, the families of Cypriniformes are traditionally divided into two superfamilies. Superfamily Cyprinioidea contains the carps and minnows and, according to some, Catostomoidea is usually treated as a junior synonym of Cobitioidea. But it seems that it could be split off the Catostomidae and Gyrinocheilidae in a distinct superfamily, while the Cyprinioidea seem more primitive than the loach-like forms, they were apparently successful enough never to shift from the original ecological niche of the basal Ostariophysi. Yet, from the ecomorphologically conservative main lineage apparently at least two major radiations branched off and these diversified from the lowlands into torrential river habitats, acquiring similar habitus and adaptations in the process. The mountain carps are highly apomorphic Cyprinidae, perhaps close to true carps, a systematic list, from the most ancient to the most modern lineages, can thus be given as, Superfamily Cyprinoidei Family Cyprinidae Bonaparte,1840 and minnows incl. This is evidenced not only by physiological details, but their great distribution, the earliest that Cypriniformes might have diverged from Characiphysi is thought to be about the Early Triassic, about 250 million years ago
6.
Cyprinidae
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The Cyprinidae are the family of freshwater fishes, collectively called cyprinids, that includes the carps, the true minnows, and their relatives. The family belongs to the ostariophysian order Cypriniformes, of whose genera, the family name is derived from the Ancient Greek kyprînos. Cyprinids are stomachless fish with toothless jaws, even so, food can be effectively chewed by the gill rakers of the specialized last gill bow. These pharyngeal teeth allow the fish to make chewing motions against a chewing plate formed by a process of the skull. The pharyngeal teeth are species-specific and are used by specialists to determine species, strong pharyngeal teeth allow fish such as the common carp and ide to eat hard baits such as snails and bivalves. Hearing is a sense in the cyprinids since they have the Weberian organ. The vertebral processes of the Weberian organ also permit a cyprinid to detect changes in motion of the gas due to atmospheric conditions or depth changes. The cyprinids are considered physostomes because the pneumatic duct is retained in adult stages, Cyprinids are native to North America, Africa, and Eurasia. The largest known cyprinid is the giant barb, which may grow up to 3 m in length and 300 kg in weight, other very large species that can surpass 2 m are the golden mahseer and mangar. The largest North American species is the Colorado pikeminnow, which can reach up to 1.8 m in length, conversely, many species are smaller than 5 cm. The smallest known fish is Paedocypris progenetica, reaching 10.3 mm at the longest, all fish in this family are egg-layers and most do not guard their eggs, however, a few species build nests and/or guard the eggs. The bitterlings of subfamily Acheilognathinae are notable for depositing their eggs in bivalve molluscs, most cyprinids feed mainly on invertebrates and vegetation, probably due to the lack of teeth and stomach, but some species, like the asp, are predators that specialize in fish. Many species, such as the ide, and the common rudd, even small species, such as the moderlieschen, are opportunistic predators that will eat larvae of the common frog in artificial circumstances. For this reason, cyprinids are often introduced as a management tool to control various factors in the environment, such as aquatic vegetation. Cyprinids are highly important food fish, they are fished and farmed across Eurasia, in land-locked countries in particular, cyprinids are often the major species of fish eaten because they make the largest part of biomass in most water types except for fast-flowing rivers. In Eastern Europe, they are prepared with traditional methods. The prevalence of inexpensive frozen fish products made this less important now than it was in earlier times, nonetheless, in certain places, they remain popular for food, as well as recreational fishing, and have been deliberately stocked in ponds and lakes for centuries for this reason. Cyprinids are popular for angling especially for fishing and fishing for common carp because of its size
7.
Binomial nomenclature
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Such a name is called a binomial name, a binomen, binominal name or a scientific name, more informally it is also called a Latin name. The first part of the name identifies the genus to which the species belongs, for example, humans belong to the genus Homo and within this genus to the species Homo sapiens. The formal introduction of system of naming species is credited to Carl Linnaeus. But Gaspard Bauhin, in as early as 1623, had introduced in his book Pinax theatri botanici many names of genera that were adopted by Linnaeus. Although the general principles underlying binomial nomenclature are common to these two codes, there are differences, both in the terminology they use and in their precise rules. Similarly, both parts are italicized when a binomial name occurs in normal text, thus the binomial name of the annual phlox is now written as Phlox drummondii. In scientific works, the authority for a name is usually given, at least when it is first mentioned. In zoology Patella vulgata Linnaeus,1758, the original name given by Linnaeus was Fringilla domestica, the parentheses indicate that the species is now considered to belong in a different genus. The ICZN does not require that the name of the person who changed the genus be given, nor the date on which the change was made, in botany Amaranthus retroflexus L. – L. is the standard abbreviation used in botany for Linnaeus. – Linnaeus first named this bluebell species Scilla italica, Rothmaler transferred it to the genus Hyacinthoides, the ICN does not require that the dates of either publication be specified. Prior to the adoption of the binomial system of naming species. Together they formed a system of polynomial nomenclature and these names had two separate functions. First, to designate or label the species, and second, to be a diagnosis or description, such polynomial names may sometimes look like binomials, but are significantly different. For example, Gerards herbal describes various kinds of spiderwort, The first is called Phalangium ramosum, Branched Spiderwort, is aptly termed Phalangium Ephemerum Virginianum, Soon-Fading Spiderwort of Virginia. The Latin phrases are short descriptions, rather than identifying labels, the Bauhins, in particular Caspar Bauhin, took some important steps towards the binomial system, by pruning the Latin descriptions, in many cases to two words. The adoption by biologists of a system of binomial nomenclature is due to Swedish botanist and physician Carl von Linné. It was in his 1753 Species Plantarum that he first began using a one-word trivial name together with a generic name in a system of binomial nomenclature. This trivial name is what is now known as an epithet or specific name
8.
Pieter Bleeker
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Pieter Bleeker was a Dutch medical doctor, ichthyologist, and herpetologist. He was famous for the Atlas Ichthyologique des Orientales Neerlandaises, his work on the fishes of East Asia published between 1862 and 1877. Bleeker was employed as a officer in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army from 1842 to 1860. During that time, he did most of his ichthyology work and he acquired many of his specimens from local fishermen, but he also built up an extended network of contacts who would send him specimens from various government outposts throughout the islands. During his time in Indonesia, he collected well over 12,000 specimens, Bleeker corresponded with Auguste Duméril of Paris. His work in ichthyology and tropical medicine was recognised by two doctorates honoris causa and it was published in 36 volumes between 1862 and his death in 1878. Between 1977 and 1983, the Smithsonian republished the work in 10 volumes, Bleeker published more than 500 papers on ichthyology, describing 511 new genera and 1,925 new species. He also worked in herpetology, describing at least 14 species of reptiles, in 1855, he became correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, department Natuurkunde, and in 1862 a member. In 1856 he was elected correspondent for the Muséum national dhistoire naturelle in Paris, in January 1864 he received a French knighthood of the Légion dhonneur. He was president of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, beolens B, Watkins M, Grayson M.2011. Xiii +296 pp. ISBN 978-1-4214-0135-5, P. Bleeker, Levensbericht in, Jaarboek,1877, Amsterdam, pp. 5-159 Bleeker, P, van Oijen, MJP, Loots, GMP, van Limburg, FJG. A precursor of the fish of the Indian Archipelago, the Bleeker/Günther letters and the sale of Bleeker specimens to the British Museum. Whitehead, PJP, Boeseman, M, Wheeler, AC, the types of Bleekers Indo-Pacific Elopoid and Clupeoid Fishes
