An Introduction into Organismal Diversity

It’s time to study the diversity of life! You’ll start off this week finishing our ecology discussion while watching a video about the Brazilian Cerrado, then connect those ecological relationships across the four eukaryotic kingdoms, then take a step back and look at how we classify various types of life based on their apomorphic traits.

BY THE END OF THIS WEEK, you should be able to:

• define all terms from the previous weeks,

• see how life does not evolve in a vacuum; rather, mutations give rise to adaptations that are more suited in a given ecosystem,

• differentiate bacteria, archaea, protists, fungi, animals, and plants,

• describe organisms within each clade to the right through analysis of the phylogenetic tree,

• differentiate a phylogenetic tree from a cladogram, and

• begin to characterize different types of organisms from various clades.