Fauna
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fauna is a collective term for animal life of any particular region or time. The corresponding term for plants is flora
Zoologists and paleontologists usually use fauna to refer to a typical collection of animals found in a specific time or place, e.g. the "Sonoran Desert fauna" or the "Burgess shale fauna".
Paleontologists sometimes refer to a sequence of 80 or so faunal stages, which are a series of rocks all containing similar fossils.
The name comes from Fauna, a Roman fertility and earth goddess. Fauna is also the name of a book that catalogues the animals in such a manner. The term was first used by Linnaeus in the title of his 1746 work Fauna Suecica.
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[edit] Subdivisions of fauna
[edit] Cryofauna
Cryofauna are animals that live in, or very close to, ice.
[edit] Epifauna
Epifauna are animals that live upon the surface of sediments or soils.
[edit] Infauna
Infauna are aquatic animals that live within the bottom substratum rather than on its surface. Bacteria and microalgae may also live in the interstices of bottom sediments. On average, infaunal animals become progressively rarer with increasing water depth and distance from shore, whereas bacteria show more constancy in abundance, tending toward one billion cells per milliliter of interstitial seawater.
[edit] Macrofauna
Macrofauna are benthic or soil organisms which are at least one millimeter in length.
[edit] Megafauna
- Main article: Megafauna
Megafauna are large animals of any particular region or time. For example, Australian megafauna.
[edit] Meiofauna
Meiofauna are small benthic invertebrates that live in both marine and fresh water environments. The term Meiofauna loosely defines a group of organisms by their size, larger than microfauna but smaller than macrofauna, rather than a taxonomic grouping. In practice these are organisms that can pass through a 1 mm mesh but will be retained by a 45 μm mesh, but the exact dimensions will vary from researcher to researcher. Whether an organism will pass through a 1 mm mesh will also depend upon whether it is alive or dead at the time of sorting.
[edit] Mesofauna
Mesofauna are macroscopic soil invertebrates such as arthropods, earthworms, and nematodes.
[edit] Microfauna
Microfauna are microscopic or very small animals (usually including protozoans and very small animals such as rotifers).
[edit] Other
Other terms include avifauna, which means "bird fauna" and piscifauna (or ichthyofauna), which means "fish fauna".
[edit] Fauna treatises
[edit] Classic faunas
- Linnaeus, Carolus. Fauna Suecica. 1746