Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Types of Life

 Animals, Fungi, Plants, Protocysts, Bacteria and Viruses are all different but they are all different types of Life.

Animals, Fungi, Protists and Plants are Eukaryotes, meaning they are made of Eukaryotic cells DNA is stored in chromosomes and their DNA is found in a Nucleus inside the cell. While Bacteria are Prokaryotes which means they don't have a nucleus their DNA is loose floating around in the cell, like a stand of string floating in water.
Viruses on the other hand do not count as organisms so they don't meet the criteria of being either a 
Eukaryotic or Prokaryotic cell, they are also 10 to 100 times smaller than prokaryotic cells.

There are to our estimates 5-10 million different species of animals on earth, from fish to insects to birds to humans, but the one thing similar to all is they are Multicellular and they are Heterotrophs.
Most reproduce sexually, and each animal is made out of multiple cells instead of one.
It is thought that an adult human is made out of 40,000,000,000,000 cells or 40 trillion cells, so in order to get energy humans and animals need plants or other animals to gain energy.

Plants on the other hand with around 300,000 species on earth, ranging from tomato plants, to trees to leaves. Like animals, plants, are multicellular and they are Autotrophs instead of Heterotrophs meaning that they get energy from the sun via photosynthesis instead of consuming other organisms. 

Fungus are different from plants, they are mostly multicellular, most forms are mushrooms or fungi growing on sandwiches, but yeast which is used in bread is unicellular which means they are made of one cell. Although they look like plants, the key difference is that they cannot photosynthesis instead they get their energy from other sources like animals so they are Heterotrophs, but that's not fully correct as fungi are Saprotrophs which means that they feed using digestive enzymes outside their body to and wait for the enzymes to break down the food and then digest it by absorbing it into their bodies.
Although some of the multicellular ones have a body known as the Mycelium which is made from small string-like substances called Hyphae.
Although rare some fungi are considered Pathogens which means disease-bringing
 to humans for example Athlete's foot is a fungus that grows on your foot.

Protoctists/Protoctista/Protists/Protista. Are all basically the same thing, nearly all of them are unicellular meaning they are made of singular cells, cells like Chlorella and Euglena are similar to plant cells due to them having chloroplast, while other cells like Amoeba are similar to animal cells because they have to consume other organisms to survive. Most protoctists have nothing to do with humans although some are considerd pathogens and are harmful to humans like Plasmodium which causes Malaria. 

Bacteria live practically everywhere from skin, to the ground to even food, although some species can photosynthesize bacteria in general don't have chloroplasts, but most feed of other organisms maybe dead leaves or living organisms like humans. 
Scientists speculate that there are more species of bacteria than all the other species of life on this planet combined. Some are harmful like Salmonella which causes food poisoning, but most don't bother with humans, in fact some are even helpful to humans like the bacteria in our intestines that help digest food that we eat.

Viruses are basically small tiny particles, for a sense of scale you can fit around 1 million of them along the width of a single fingernail, all viruses are different but all have similar features like a Protein coat around it.

  

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