Fauna
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Fauna is all of the animal life of any particular region or time. The corresponding term for plants is flora. Flora, fauna and other forms of life such as fungi are collectively referred to as biota.
Zoologists and paleontologists 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". It also can refer to a given subset of the fauna of a given region, as in: "... the Amazon Basin has a rich ant fauna...".
Paleontologists sometimes refer to a sequence of faunal stages, which is a series of rocks all containing similar fossils.
Etymology
"Fauna" comes from the Latin names of Fauna, a Roman goddess of earth and fertility, 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 1745[1] work Fauna Suecica.
Subdivisions of fauna
Cryofauna
Cryofauna are animals that live in, or very close to, ice.
Cryptofauna
Cryptofauna are animals that are rarely seen and may be extinct or mythological.
Infauna
Infauna are benthic organisms that live within the bottom substratum of a body of water, especially within the bottom-most oceanic sediments, rather than on its surface. Bacteria and microalgae may also live in the interstices of bottom sediments. In general infaunal animals become progressively smaller and less abundant 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.
Epifauna
Epifauna, also called epibenthos, are aquatic animals that live on the bottom substratum as opposed to within it, that is, the benthic fauna that live on top of the sediment surface at the seafloor.
Macrofauna
Macrofauna are benthic or soil organisms which are retained on a 0.5mm sieve. Studies in the deep sea define macrofauna as animals retained on a 0.3mm sieve to account for the small size of many of the taxa.
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. One environment for meiofauna is between grains of damp sand (see Mystacocarida).
In practice these are metazoan animals that can pass unharmed through a 0.5 – 1 mm mesh but will be retained by a 30 – 45 μm mesh,[2] but the exact dimensions will vary from researcher to researcher. Whether an organism passes through a 1 mm mesh also depends upon whether it is alive or dead at the time of sorting.
Mesofauna
Mesofauna are macroscopic soil invertebrates such as arthropods or nematodes. There are approximately 6500 species has been identified up to now [3].
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".
Other
"Fauna was a term author Aldo Leopold used in describing the fragile environment along the Round River" from: A Sand County Almanac.
Fauna treatises
Classic faunas
- Linnaeus, Carolus. Fauna Suecica. 1746
See also
References
3 http://www.springerlink.com/content/v7044wm252462k53/
External links
