Explanation of Diversity in The Living World: Our planet earth is made up of a diverse range of living habitats with vast biodiversity in terms of flora and fauna. Organisms are majorly classified into two types – unicellular and multicellular.
Unicellular organisms grow by cell division. In multicellular organisms, plants also grow by cell division throughout their lifespan while animals reproduce and grow only at a certain point in their lives.
Growth, reproduction, and metabolism are the most important characteristic features of living organisms. Each and every living organism depends on plants either directly or indirectly for food in order to produce energy for the various living process. This breakdown of complex food molecules into simpler substances and assimilating simpler substances into complex proteins is known as metabolism.
Apart from these living processes, response to stimuli is the most complicated and essential feature of living organisms. When plants and animals respond to stimuli such as stress, surrounding environmental conditions, and physical, chemical, and biological factors such as light, temperature, water, pollutants, etc., the organisms learn to adapt themselves to the environment for their survival and existence on the planet.
Nomenclature of organisms:
Nomenclature is defined as the identification of an organism in a manner that is universally accepted. Biologists assign a scientific name to each and every organism that helps them identify them and study their habitat and other living process. Based on universally agreed principles and criteria, scientific names for plants are assigned by International Code for Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN), and for animals by International Code for Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN).
Binomial Nomenclature: Each scientific name has two components – generic name and species name. This styling of having two components in a name is defined as binomial nomenclature. This naming system was provided by Carolus Linnaeus, also known as the Father of Taxonomy, and is followed by biologists worldwide.
Generic name: Generic name is common to organisms of the same kind. For example, rats have a common generic name known as ‘Rattus’
Species name: Species names differ in the organisms of the same kind based on certain differential criteria. For example, different species of rats are ‘Rattus norvegicus’, ‘Rattus Rattus, etc.
Convention rules to be followed while writing scientific names:
1. Scientific names are written in italics as they are Latin in origin.
2. The first component always represents the generic name, while the second component of the scientific name represents a species name.
3. While writing, both the components are underlined if hand-written and printed in italics to indicate their Latin origin.
4. The first letter of the generic name is always written in block letters and the first letter of the species name is always written in a small case.