(Aquatic biologists) study micro-organisms, plants, and animals living in water.

Invertebrates are animal species that do not develop a vertebral column. This in effect includes all animals apart from the subphylum Vertebrata. Familiar examples of invertebrates include insects, worms, clams, crabs, octopus, snails, and starfish. Taxonomically speaking, "invertebrate" is no more than a term of convenience. The vast majority of animal species are invertebrates, since only about 3% of animal species include a vertebral column in their anatomy.[1] In other words all animals except those in the chordate subphylum Vertebrata (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) are regarded as invertebrates. Furthermore, many individual invertebrate taxons have a greater number and variety of species than the entire subphylum of Vertebrata.[2] In fact some of the so-called invertebrata, such as the Chaetognatha and Hemichordata, are more closely related to the Chordata than to other invertebrate phyla. The division of the entire Kingdom Animalia into vertebrates (about 65000 species in part of one phylum) and invertebrates certainly is convenient in some practical contexts, but to put it into taxonomic perspective, it is roughly on the same scale as dividing the animal kingdom into, for example, gastropods (perhaps 60000 species in part of one phylum) and non-gastropods; worthwhile only in certain constrained contexts. Microfauna (Ancient Greek mikros "small" + New Latin fauna "animal") refers to microscopic organisms that exhibit animal-like qualities. Microfauna are represented in the animal kingdom (e.g., nematodes, small arthropods) and the protist kingdom (i.e., protozoans). This is in contrast to microflora which, together with microfauna, make up the microzoa. Macrofauna are benthic or soil organisms which are retained on a 0.5mm sieve. Studies in the deep sea define macrofauna as animals retained on a 0.3mm sieve to account for the small size of many of the taxa.

Chlorophyta

"Siphoneae" from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur, 1904

Scientific classification Kingdom: Viridiplantae Chlorophyta Division:

Reichenbach, 1834; [1][2] Pascher

Chlorophyta
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Classes[3] Bryopsidophyceae Chlorophyceae Pedinophyceae Pleurastrophyceae

Prasinophyceae Trebouxiophyceae Ulvophyceae

Green algae on coastal rocks at Shihtiping in Taiwan

Chlorophyta is a division of green algae, informally called chlorophytes. The name is used in two very different senses, so care is needed to determine the use by a particular author. In older classification systems, it refers to a highly paraphyletic group of all the green algae within the green plants (Viridiplantae) and thus includes about 7,000 species[4][5] of mostly aquatic photosynthetic eukaryotic organisms. Like the land plants (bryophytes and tracheophytes), green algae contain chlorophylls a and b and store food as starch[4] in their plastids. In newer classifications, it refers to one of the two clades making up the Viridiplantae, which are the chlorophytes and the streptophytes or charophytes.[6][7] In this sense it includes only about 4,300 species.[3]
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