What is the 5 Kingdom Classification System?
The five-kingdom classification system categorizes living things based on their common characteristics and how they differ.
Scientists have developed multiple ways of separating living things into groups or kingdoms, but the most common classification system is dividing living things into five kingdoms. These five kingdoms are:
- Animals
- Plants
- Fungi
- Protists
- Monerans
The 5 Animal Kingdoms
Animals
Living creatures in the Animal Kingdom are multicellular and consume other organic matter for food. Regarding diversity, the animal kingdom is the largest of all the kingdoms, and examples of animals can be found anywhere on the planet.
Animals are usually mobile and can detect things in their environment using various senses such as sight, smell, hearing, and taste. Due to the process of evolution, animals have adapted to live in many settings and eat a wide variety of foods, leading to massive diversity within the kingdom.
Examples of animals include birds, fish, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, mollusks, insects, and many more living things. In addition, some living things can be defined as animals, even though they do not look like animals, such as coral.
Plants
Living things in the Plant Kingdom grow in the earth and absorb nutrients from the soil through roots. Plants also use their leaves to absorb energy from the Sun; this is called photosynthesis. Plants need water, carbon dioxide, and nutrients to survive, though some plants have adapted to absorb nutrients from insects, such as the Venus flytrap.
Next to animals, plants are among the most diverse of the kingdoms. Not only that, but many species of plant that still exist today are ancient, such as ferns, which are over 350 million years old and have survived when many species of animals, such as the dinosaurs, have gone extinct.
Fungi
Fungi are living creatures that are very diverse. Some resemble bacteria, while others look more like plants. What defines a fungus is its ability to absorb nutrients from its environment by secreting enzymes. Unlike plants, fungi do not photosynthesize. Examples of Fungi include mushrooms, mold, and yeast.
Fungi reproduce using spores which they disperse into the air or water. Fungi are essential to the broader animal kingdom because they are decomposers, living things that consume the remains of other living things and convert them into their base nutrients.
Protists
Protists are living things that are not animals, plants, fungi, or bacteria. A prominent example of a protist is algae. The difference between protists and monera is that the cell of a protist has a nucleus, whereas the cell of a monera does not.
Protists are among the most primitive forms of life and have existed for millions of years. Initially, the protist kingdom comprised all microscopic organisms, but scientists created a separate empire to differentiate between protists and bacteria.
Monerans
Monerans are single-celled organisms, usually referred to as bacteria. Bacteria can be found everywhere and are considered one of the simplest forms of life. Bacteria are single-celled and can feed almost anywhere, meaning they can also live anywhere.
Bacteria live on and inside many other living creatures, including Humans. For example, the human digestive system depends
Who Created the 5 Animal Kingdom Classification Systems?
Robert Whittaker first created the system of sorting living things in 1969. He built off the work of previous scientists such as Carl Linnaeus, who first suggested classifying living things into plants and animals, and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who first discovered microscopic organisms.
