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FIVE-KINGDOM-CLASSIFICATION

•Once upon a time, all living things were lumped together into two kingdoms, namely plants and animals (at least, that's how I learned it). •Animals included every living thing that moved, ate, and grew to a certain size and stopped growing. Plants included every living thing that did not move or eat and that continued to grow throughout life.•It became very difficult to group some living things into one or the other, so early in the past century the two kingdoms were expanded into five kingdoms: Protista(the single-celled eukaryotes); Fungi (fungus and related organisms); Plantae (the plants); Animalia (the animals); Monera (the prokaryotes).

•Many biologists now recognize six distinct kingdoms, dividing Monera into the Eubacteria and Archeobacteria. •All I can say is that the sytem holds true for this week, at least. It might even hold up for a century or two. Accepted systems of classification have changed at a far faster pace than the species have taken to evolve, that's for certain. •Kingdoms are divided into categories called phyla, each phylum is divided into classes, each class into orders, each order into families, each family into genera, and each genus into species. A species represents one type of organism, such as dog, tiger shark, Ameoba proteus (the common amoeba), Homo sapiens (us), or Acer palmatum (Japanese maple). Note that species names should be underlined or written in italics. •Classifying larger organisms into kingdoms is usually easy, but in a microenvironment it can be tricky. If you have had a little biology, a good exercise is to describe individual living things, and to try to classify them as to kingdom.

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