Classification

May 2023

Seven kingdom classification

You will also find reference to four three and two kingdom classifications although these
have now generally disappeared. When I first studied this there were just two kingdoms,
animals and plants! Now, many taxonomists consider that the bacterial kingdom might
actually be split into several different kingdoms because some of the organisms are so
different!

The diagram represents these kingdoms.

This is a phylogeny, albeit rather a diagrammatic one! Vertical axis still represents time.

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Details later but a few comments on the diagram.

It separates unicellular and multicellular and some bacteria appear as multicellular organisms.
Strangely there is some debate about when an organism is multicellular. The definition is
usually applied to a collection of cells where there is some specialisation, that is, some cells
have a particular function whilst others in the group have a different function. In the
multicellular bacteria there will be a limited separation of function within a group of cells so
they are considered as a multicellular organism. However, the degree of specialisation is
weak.

Another split kingdom is the Protoctista. Some protoctistans are single free living cells;
Plasmodium, the malarial parasite is a single celled protoctistan, as is Amoeba, an organism
some of you may be familiar with from earlier biology studies. However, some protoctistans
are large and complex. Seaweeds which have well defined parts associated with attachment,
photosynthesis and reproduction are also protoctistans.

Many Fungi are single celled, the most common example being yeast.

All modern plants and animals are multicellular although the simplest Animalia phylum the
Porifera, sponges, show weak specialisation. All the other groups are properly multicellular
although some have simple specialisation and a low number of identifiable cell types.

In Charles Darwin’s time biology, called natural history, would have had been about
classification and little else. Anatomy was well understood as it provided the basis for
studying and classifying organism but physiology, cell biology and biochemistry were non-
existent! Genetics in the sense of breeding was dawning on the world through the
experiments of Gregor Mendel but as we have already noted this work was unknown to
Darwin and his contemporaries. Over the years the emphasis of biological work changed
and taxonomy became a small and decreasing part of general biology although in absolute
numbers more people may have been studying it than in earlier times.

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The kingdoms of living organisms

The Archaea

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The bacteria

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The Protoctista

The Fungi

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The Plantae

Figure 1.31 refers to the phylogeny of plants diagram that will be in the tutorials this week.

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The Animalia
There are twenty nine animal phyla although we only look at seven, and even then in limited
detail. The first six are invertebrates, animals without an internal skeleton.

Vertebrate and invertebrate? …………………………………………………………...………

……………………………………………………………………………………………..……

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The Chordata
This is our phylum!

Neoteny
The axolotl is an amphibian that shows clear neoteny. Its adult form, in the biological sense,
show juvenile features. The natural lack of metamorphosis is due to their inability to
synthesise TSH. Axolotls can be induced to undergo metamorphosis by injection of
thyroxine or, perhaps more strangely, iodine.

They are very rare in the wild, originally been found in only two lakes near Mexico City.
Urbanisation has resulted in one of these lakes, Lake Chalco, has been drained completely
and the second, Lake Xochimilco, reduced hugely in size by the growth of Mexico City.
Axolotls are fairly easy to breed in captivity and are a widely used experimental animal for
research into embryology, heart disease and neural development.

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Neoteny and the evolution of chordates
The basic characteristics of chordates are a post-anal tail, pharyngeal slits (gill slits), a dorsal
nerve cord and a dorsal notochord.

Post-anal tail ……………………………………………………..……………………………..

…………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Pharynx ……………………………………………………………….………………………..

…………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Dorsal nerve cord ………………………………………………………………………………

…………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Notochord ……………………………………………………………………………………..
……………

…………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The important question is how the chordates arose from other invertebrate phyla? They
share deuterostomy with the echninoderms but have developed all the above features. An
important group of organisms that link vertebrates and invertebrates are the protochordates, a
term used to describe sub-phylum Tunicata, the most important of which belong to a class
called the Ascidians..

The adult animal has some but not all chordate features. They are marine and sessile. They
are not seen easily at the seaside as they are sub-littoral but can been observed on things like
the support legs of piers or jetties where the tide exposes them for very short periods. They
vary in size from a few millimetre to several centimetre in diameter and can be twenty
centimetre long although most are much smaller. They are filter feeders that create a current
of sea water that enters through a hole on a short projection called an inhalant or incurrent
syphon, passes through pharyngeal slits filtering out small organisms and then leaves via a
second syphon., the exhalent or excurrent syphon. They have a tough outer coating which
acts like a skeleton but no internal skeleton. This is proteinaceous and has undergone
tanning to make it hard and resistant.

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Here is an adult tunicate.

Looks nothing like a chordate, no notochord, no nerve cord, no tail. It does have pharyngeal
slits for feeding.

Being sessile raises the problem of distribution of young. In its reproductive cycle motile
larvae are produced from the zygote that are able to swim and locate suitable environments
before settling and becoming fixed in a particular place. Figure (c) shows the larva.

The tunicate larva does have typically chordate feature.

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It is believed that the development of neoteny in tunicate larvae gave rise to the chordates.
By being able to breed they retained the larval features throughout their lives which allowed
them to exploit a wider range of environments and undergo adaptive radiation to form the
true vertebrate chordates.

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There are two further concepts you need to be familiar with that are mentioned above in the
descriptions of the various phyla.

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General principles of formal classification
We have been discussing major groups of similar organisms like domains and phyla but this
formal classification system continues Here is a example:

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We refer to this as a hierarchy. A species, identified by its genus and species is unique but
share certain features with others that allows the construction of the hierarchy. Many of
these groups are broken down further, for example, we have already mentioned the Tunicates
as a sub-phylum and the same type of division occurs at other levels of the hierarchy. We
would not expect knowledge of this.

Clade
Although we have not yet mentioned this term you will find it commonly used in discussing
classification. A clade is a group of organisms that share a single common ancestor. It has
been around from the 1950s and the general concept existed in Darwin’s time. Its use has
grown with the development of DNA analysis that can link groups in the manner discussed in
the evolution sessions. Clades can be nested, which means one sits within another.

The brief description given on Wikipedia is a good introductory summary of the idea and I
have reproduced it below.

A cladogram (family tree) of a biological group, showing the last common ancestor of the
composite tree, which is the vertical line 'trunk' (stem) at the bottom, with all descendant
branches shown above. The blue and red subgroups (at left and right) are clades, or
monophyletic (complete) groups; each shows its common ancestor 'stem' at the bottom of the
subgroup 'branch'. The green subgroup is not a clade; it is a paraphyletic group, which is an
incomplete clade here because it excludes the blue branch even though it has also descended
from the common ancestor stem at the bottom of the green branch. The green subgroup
together with the blue one forms a clade again.

I have tried to remove a number of hyperlinks but may not have fully succeeded as they can
remain hidden in the text, so you may find you connect inadvertently to other Wikipedia
articles.

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