Seychelles: Indian Ocean Marine Biodiversity Survey
as part of Shoals of Capricorn Programme
Descriptions of words and terms
- benthic
- seabed
- benthos
- living organisms of seabed
- cladistics
- method of classification that groups organisms by relative recency of common ancestry
- dredge
- apparatus for seabed sampling
- epifauna
- animals living on seabed surface
- grab
- apparatus for taking a fixed area sample of the seabed
- intertidal
- between high and low water marks of the tide
- macrofauna
- animals larger than 500 μm
- megafauna
- large animals
- meiofauna
- animals less than 500 μm
- mollusc
- soft bodied animal, many of which live enclosed in a hard shell, e.g. snail, clam, mussel
- phylogeny
- the evolutionary history and line of descent of a species or higher taxonomic group
- polychaete
- a class of mainly marine worms (bristle worms)
- systematics
- the study of taxonomy and phylogeny
- taxonomy
- the classification of living organisms
- temperate
- areas with a moderate climate, e.g. Europe
- tropical
- areas with a climate characterised by high temperature, humidity and rainfall
- zoogeography
- geographical distribution of animal species
