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OVERVIEW OF FAUNA
Translate into English by Hồng Luân
I Human and Animal
Human completely depended on the nature from their beginning. Hominidae, by eating cooked meats from wild animals, gradually developed their brains, separates from group of wild animals and became human. Human used simple hunting techniques like chasing, surrounding and pushing animals into caves or holes and then caught and killed animals. After approximately 30,000 years B.C, human knew how to use javelins, arrows and some other primitive tools to catch animals. Human in Stone Age already knew that animals like horses, buffalos, rhinos, elephants can be hunted for flesh and birds like capercailzies, pheasants, peacocks, ducks, geese can give delicious meats.
Many evidences from archeology proved that human had hunted wild birds for flesh from ancient time. In the process of population expansion, the balance between human and animal was no longer maintained like before. Human applied any possible means from simple to complex or from primitive to modern to hunt terrestrial as well as aquatic animals.
Due to the impacts of human, animal populations fluctuates every year. There are species that became rare or extinct all over the world. However, human also domesticated species ranging from dogs, cats, horses, pigs, cows and rabbits to birds like pigeons, chickens, ducks for breeding. Ever since they had known the benefits from other species, human also started breeding bees, deers, monkeys, geckos, pythons, snakes, toads.
II Classification of animal world
Human had the demand of classifying observed animals long time ago. It is taxonomy and it was gradually improved by modern science in order to bring about system of classification that we know today.
Normally, people divided animals into vertebrates and invertebrates. The vertebrates have skeleton including a spine formed by many vertebrae. The invertebrates, on the other hands, do not have such spine. Reality, however, is much more complex than that because the vertebrates group including fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and animals only takes a very small percentage of the animal world. In specific, there are only 40,000 species of vertebrates in 1,100,000 species (or more).
Phylum:
In the system of classification, there is phylum. For example, the chordata phylum includes species with one notochord (at least in embryonic state), a primitive form of spine. Because there are not muchs species with notochord, people put them into a phylum. Phylum is a huge unit in system of classification. One phylum is featured by one specific anatomical structure. The other phyla belong to invertebrates. Important phyla include Mollusc (usually with hard outer shell), Echinoderm (sea stars, for instance), Arthropod (with exoskeleton including insects, crustaceans, spiders etc) and Coelenterata (including coral, jellyfish)
There are huge differences between representatives of these phyla. For example, while most of species have bilateral symmetry, Echinoderm species are radically symmetric; i.e. radically distributed around one axis. Arthropod and Annelid (like earthworms, leeches) have segmentation form, i.e. their bodies consist of many segments storing nearly similar organs.
Classes, Orders, Families, Geneses, Species,
Each phylum is divided into classes and then orders and so on. For example, pigeon species with the Latin name (accepted worldwide) Columba do Linne (Carl Linnaeus) given by Swedish biologist in 1758, comprise of Rock dove (Gầm ghì đá) – Columba livia Gmelin, House pigeons – Columba livia domestica Gmelin and Brown pigeons – Columba punicea (Blyth). In the name of species, the first word is the name of Genus, the second word is the name of species, and the third name is the name of the biologist who described that species; sometimes, people also include the year of describing to make it more convenient for identifying and looking up. Genus Columba includes House pigeon, Forest pigeon, Brown pigeon. Genus Columba and neighbouring genera like Streptopelia, Treron make up Columbidae pigeon family. This family belongs to Columbiformes pigeon order, which is in Aves class.
Giving Latin names to organisms was proposed by Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botagonist. Similar to Vietnamese, they describe the appearances of organisms, their habitats, customs or geographic locations; Columbia punicea, for instance, is the name of Brown pigeon (puniceus means brown); other examples include Columbia livia domestica which is the name of House pigeon (domestica means being nurtured at home) and Ursus malayanus which is the name of Sun Bear or Malayan Sun Bear (the first time the taxonomist found in Malaysia). Sometimes, people use the name of biologist who discovered the organism for its name. The names are also sometimes incorrect; Malayan Sun Bear, for example, does not only live in Malaysia but also in other countries. The naming of organisms has to follow international rules of naming like in plant science. For example, how to write correct a latin name of Anh Vu fish in Vietnam (a fish in Vietnam red data book)
Semilabeo notabilis Peter, 1880
Genus name: normally in italic with capitalized first letter
Species name: normally in italic with non-capitalized first letter
Synonym name: normally in italic with non-capitalized first letter
Author name (the one who discovered or have named that species): normally with capitalized first letter, in case of the first man who discovered or gave name to the species, the author name is in brackets.
People sometimes confuse between species and races. Race is the classification lower than species. Different races can be different to each others in some features or live in different areas. Some races originated from artificial selection; different races of dog, for example, root from one species of house dog Canis familiaris Linnaeus.
It’s very hard to determine the exactly number of fauna species existing on our planet up to date. The reason is that sometimes subspecies are classified as species and new species are continually discovered and described by taxononomist. How many species have you known?
Summarization of animal kingdom
This summarization below show the classification system applied in animal kingdom. There are 14 or 21 phyla. The list below only describes main phyla, the others only include few species which only in-depth researchers have interest. On the other hands, between different phyla and classes there is difference in the level of importance; Insect, for instance, has the population 10 times of vertebrate species
Protozoa (6 classes)
Porfera
Coelenterata
- Hydrozoa
- Scyphozoa
- Anthozoa
- Ctenophora
Plathelminthes (5 classes)
Nemertini
Nemathelminthes (6 classes)
Mollusca
- Loricata
- Aplacophora
- Monoplacophora
- Gastropoda
- Scaphopoda
- Pelecypoda
- Cephalopoda
Annelida
- Polychaeta
- Oligochaeta
- Hirundinea
- Sipunculida
- Eciurida
Onichophora
Arthropoda
- Trilobita
- Merotomata
- Arachnida
- Pantopoda
- Crustacea
- Myriopoda
- Insecta
Bryozoa
Brachiopoda
Echinodennata
- Crinoidea
- Asteroidea
- Ophiuroidea
- Horothuroidea
Pogonophora
Chaetognatha
Hemichordata
- Enteropneusta
- Pterobranchia
Chordata
Urochordata
- Ascidiacea
- Larvacea
- Salpae
Cephalochordata
Vertebrata
- Pisces
- Amphibia
- Reptilia
- Aves
- Mamalia
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