This book introduces you to creatures from the protist kingdom, from microscopic protozoans to seaweedlike algae. It examines the parts, life cycle, and reproduction of various types of protists. It also looks at the harmful effects some protists have on humans. Did You Know? The deadly disease malaria is caused in part by the protist Plasmodium. The fossils of one type of protist, the red algae, date back more than 500 million years. Paramecium, a well known protist, uses hairlike cilia to sweep food into its mouth.

Life Sciences.

This book is written for ecologists and protozoologists. Ecologists who study environments and biotic communities in which protozoa are im portant should find this book especially useful. During the last decade it has become clear that protozoa play important roles in natural eco systems, but few ecologists have a feeling for the functional properties and the diversity of these organisms. Protozoa pose or exemplify many general problems of population and community ecology, and of evo lutionary biology. In most respects the general ecological properties of protozoa are not fundamentally different from those of larger organisms; yet, due to their small size, short generation times, and ubiquitous oc currence they often present ecological phenomena in a new and dif ferent light. To this should be added that protozoa are well-suited for experimental work. Despite these advantages, the study of protozoa has played a relatively modest role in the development of ecology and ev olutionary biology, primarily, I believe, because most ecologists are unfamiliar with these organisms. I hope this book will attract more attention to these favorable characteristics of protozoa. I also hope that this book may make protozoologists aware of new aspects of their pet organisms. For a long time (that is, until the fun damental distinction between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells was rec ognized) protozoa were believed to represent the simplest form of life. They were therefore extensively used for the experimental study of basic questions of cell biology.

Milliken's Kingdoms of Life series is aligned with national science standards and reflects current teaching practices. Each book includes approximately 50 black and white reproducible pages, 12 full-color transparencies (print books) or PowerPoint slides (eBooks), comprehension questions and lab activities for each unit, an answer key, a glossary of bolded terms, a timeline of biological discovery, a laboratory safety guide, as well as a national standards correlation chart. Protista details the structure and behavior of protists — distinguished from monera principally by being composed of so-called "true cells" (eukaryotes), or cells containing a distinct nucleus. Protists can be either unicellular or multicellular and include most algae and some fungi.

Conservation and biodiversity of protists The conservation of biodiversity is not just an issue of plants and vertebrates. It is the scarcely visible invertebrates and myriads of other microscopic organisms that are crucial to the maintenance of ecological processes on which all larger organisms and the composition of the atmosphere ultimately depend. Biodiversity and Conservation endeavours to take an holistic view of biodiversity, and when the opportunity arises to issue collections of papers dealing with too-often neglected groups of organisms. The protists, essentially eukaryotes that cannot be classi?ed in the kingdoms of animals, fungi, or plants, include some of the lea- known groups of organisms on earth. They are generally treated as a separate kingdom, commonly named Protista (or Protoctista) in textbooks, but in reality they are a mixture of organisms with disparate a?nities. Some authors have hypothesized that the numbers of protists are not especially large, and that many have extraordinarily wide distributions. However, the p- ture that unfolds from the latest studies discussed in this issue is di?erent. There are many species with wide ranges, and proportionately more cosmopolitan species than in macroorganism groups, as a result of their long evolutionary histories, but there are also de?nite patterns and geographical restrictions to be found. Further, some protists are linked to host organisms as mutualists or parasites and necessarily con?ned to the distributions of their hosts.