Question

Animals can be distinguished from all other living organisms by a suite of characters. During your quarantine you often visited a nearby stream. During one of your adventures you stumbled upon an organism for which you must determine its identity. Your hunch is that this thing is an animal, but you need to make observations to determine this with confidence.

Provide the necessary information that allows you to distinguish your organism from each group of living things listed below; you should have at least one unique characteristic which differs from all others for each organism listed. Appropriate terminology should be used. (1) Bacteria & Archaea, (2) Plants, (3) Fungi, (4) Protozoa.

Now that you have determined this organism to be an animal, select 1 phylum we discussed in class and provide 2 descriptive characteristics about that phylum. One of them MUST be unique to the phylum (e.g., saying it is triploblastic is not unique, as almost all animal phyla possess this characteristic).

Answer 1

Unique characteristics for each organism

1. bacteria and archaea:

a. The cells lack organelles or other internal membrane bound structures

b. They generally have a singular circular chromosome located in an area called nucleoid.

2. Plants

a. Plants are photosynthetic which means they are oxygenic photoautotrophs where oxygen is released as byproduct of photosynthesis.

3. Fungi

a. They have a unique cell wall composition consisting of both chitin and beta glucan molecules.

b. They can exits in both unicellular and multicellular forms.

4. Protozoa

a. They are eukaryotic, single celled which lack cell wall.

We will describe about the kingdom fungi

1. The unique characteristic of fungi is composition of cell wall which is made up of chitin instead of cellulose as in plants.

2. They can exist in two different states like unicellular (yeast) and multicellular (hyphae).