The kingdom Protista includes organisms those who couldn't be clearly included as plants, animals, fungi. Hence it is considered as an artificial taxone. Further this is considered as a paraphyletic/polyphuletic taxone. That is, members who derived from 2 or more ancestral forms. Hence do not reflect phylogeny.
The characteristic features of Kingdom Protista are :
-All are eukaryotic
-Most are unicellular
-There are some colonial and multicellular forms too.
-Cell wall if present made out of cellulose together with some other materials.
Kingom Protista divides into 6 phyla. They are :
-Ciliophora
-Rhizopoda
-Chrysophyta
-Phaephyta
-Rhodophyta
-Chlorophyta
If you want to know a detailed description of each one of the above phyla, feel free to tell me so.
So how can protists have a big impact on your life?Protista are an important kingdom to all life on Earth. Protists include algae. They produce most of the oxygen on Earth via the process of photosynthesis. Besides that, the chemical energy that they produce is available to primary consumers in ocean food chains. Without algae, there would be no ocean food chains and all the fisheries in the world would die off. Protists make up the plankton in the ocean that other organisms rely on as a source of nutrition. Some protists are important as disease vectors. For example, amebic dysentery is a serious illness that affects and kills humans. The protist Plasmodium falciparum causes malaria is a disease that kills millions of people every year in the tropics and is carried by Anopheles mosquitoes.
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