Classification and Marine Biodiversity
Classification and Marine Biodiversity
Important Background Information that you need to know and understand: (Understand the Key Concepts)
Key words: binominal system of naming; science of classification is taxonomy; species; levels of classification (know them); dichotomous identification key; 5 kingdoms; etc…
CLASSIFICATION
Our oceans have a great variety of life forms. Thousands of new species are discovered each year. We need to identify, name, and know the biology of all the marine species. To understand this huge array of species, a simple classification system is used to produce some order out of chaos. Example: this class has persons of all sorts of shapes, sizes, colour, eye colour, finger shape & size, etc….what criteria would you use to separate us all out?
HISTORY
Historically, we group things according to their likeness or use. There were grouping such as edible, poisonous, or medicinal. In your own dialect, you have local names for the edible things on the reef but there is no name for sponges, ascidians, and nudibranchs which you have no use for. There are only general names for corals, sharks, etc. In Fiji, we have no names for the deepsea snappers because we never caught and eat them but in Hawaii and Kiribati, you have different names for different deepsea snappers because you have caught them for generations. Fiji have large lagoonal areas and never needed to fish off-shore..
25 years ago, Fijian students knew the local names of fish. Today, many students have lost that knowledge because they rarely go back to the village.
Aristotle is the first scientist to classify all living things. John Ray developed keys to identify animals. Linnaeus (1707-1778), a Swede invented a simple naming system which we still use today (binominal nomenclature) made up of 2 Latinized words (genus species). e.g. Homo sapiens (in italics or underlined with the first letter in the genus is in capital). The genus or species may be descriptive or
Important Background Information that you need to know and understand: (Understand the Key Concepts)
Key words: binominal system of naming; science of classification is taxonomy; species; levels of classification (know them); dichotomous identification key; 5 kingdoms; etc…
CLASSIFICATION
Our oceans have a great variety of life forms. Thousands of new species are discovered each year. We need to identify, name, and know the biology of all the marine species. To understand this huge array of species, a simple classification system is used to produce some order out of chaos. Example: this class has persons of all sorts of shapes, sizes, colour, eye colour, finger shape & size, etc….what criteria would you use to separate us all out?
HISTORY
Historically, we group things according to their likeness or use. There were grouping such as edible, poisonous, or medicinal. In your own dialect, you have local names for the edible things on the reef but there is no name for sponges, ascidians, and nudibranchs which you have no use for. There are only general names for corals, sharks, etc. In Fiji, we have no names for the deepsea snappers because we never caught and eat them but in Hawaii and Kiribati, you have different names for different deepsea snappers because you have caught them for generations. Fiji have large lagoonal areas and never needed to fish off-shore..
25 years ago, Fijian students knew the local names of fish. Today, many students have lost that knowledge because they rarely go back to the village.
Aristotle is the first scientist to classify all living things. John Ray developed keys to identify animals. Linnaeus (1707-1778), a Swede invented a simple naming system which we still use today (binominal nomenclature) made up of 2 Latinized words (genus species). e.g. Homo sapiens (in italics or underlined with the first letter in the genus is in capital). The genus or species may be descriptive or