Everything about Fauna totally explained
Fauna is all of the
animal life of any particular region or time. The corresponding term for plants is
flora.
Zoologists and
paleontologists use
fauna to refer to a typical collection of animals found in a specific time or place, for example the "
Sonoran Desert fauna" or the "
Burgess shale fauna".
Paleontologists sometimes refer to a sequence of
faunal stages, which is a series of rocks all containing similar fossils.
The name comes from
Fauna, a Roman fertility and earth goddess, the Roman god
Faunus, and the related forest spirits called
Fauns. All three words are cognates of the name of the Greek god
Pan, and
panis is the
Greek equivalent of fauna.
Fauna is also the word for a book that catalogues the animals in such a manner. The term was first used by
Linnaeus in the title of his 1747 work
Fauna Suecica.
Subdivisions of fauna
Epifauna
Epifauna are animals that live upon the surface of
sediments or
soils.
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. (Infauna are benthos that live buried in underwater mud.)
Macrofauna
Macrofauna are
benthic or soil organisms which are at least one millimeter in length.
Megafauna
Megafauna are large animals of any particular region or time. For example,
Australian megafauna.
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's alive or dead at the time of sorting.
Mesofauna
Mesofauna are macroscopic soil invertebrates such as
arthropods,
earthworms, and
nematodes.
Microfauna
Microfauna are microscopic or very small animals (usually including
protozoans and very small animals such as
rotifers).
Other
Other terms include
avifauna, which means "
bird fauna" and
piscifauna (or
ichthyofauna), which means "
fish fauna".
Fauna treatises
Classic faunas
Further Information
Get more info on 'Fauna'.
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