Bacteria, fungi, algae, etc., etc.,.
Is there a single word or term subsuming all living organisms that aren’t plants/animals? (E.g., It is NOT “one-celled living things” because there are multi-celled living things that are not animal/plant. )
Not that I know of. By the time that scientists were abandoning the two kingdom system, they would have been aware of what a weird artificial term that would be. Who would need it, and why?
I have never heard of such a term. And what would fall into such a category would depend on exactly how you defined “plant” and “animal.”
When I first learned biology, the two-kingdom model was still used. Biologists tried to shoehorned all known organisms into one of the two categories, based on a combination of whether they could make their own food, and whether they moved about. But fungi and bacteria ended up classified as plants because they didn’t move, even though they didn’t make their own food. And then there were things that just didn’t fit, like microorganisms that both photosynthesize and feed on other organisms, or weirdos like slime molds.
Today the Animalia only includes multicellular organisms, but the Plantae includes both multicellular plants as well as single-celled Green Algae (but not other kinds of algae).
In everyday use, “animal” or “plant” are still clear enough, since we don’t normally see microorganisms, and it’s convenient to consider fungi as plants. So there is no need for another term; we still informally use the two-kingdom system.
But there would be no use for such a term in scientific contexts. Organisms that are not in the Animalia or the Plantae don’t form any kind of coherent group; they are polyphyletic. Fungi are more closely related to the Animalia and Plantae than they are to other organisms; and all eucaryotic organisms are much more closely related to one another than they are to bacteria.
If scientists want to subdivide organisms in other ways, they use terms like autotroph, for organisms that make their own food, which would include Plantae, many photosynthetic eucaryotes, and the cyanobacteria; or heterotroph, which would include Animalia, Fungi, and anything else that didn’t photosythesize (or use some more exotic way of making its own food).
Back when I was a kid (at which point the Two-Kingdoms model was probably already depreciated, but word hadn’t yet made its way down to grade schools), we were told that bacteria were plants because they had cell walls. At some point, that gave way to a three-kingdom system composed of plants, animals, and everything else.
And there are photosynthetic fungi, for a suitable definition of “photosynthetic”. Hey, gamma rays are a kind of light, right?
Thanks for the replies to my question:
“Bacteria, fungi, algae, etc., etc.,.
Is there a single word or term subsuming all living organisms that aren’t plants/animals? (E.g., It is NOT “one-celled living things” because there are multi-celled living things that are not animal/plant. )”?
Probably no good, but worth a shot, how about:
If all animals and plants are larger than microscopic:
“Animals, plants, and microscopic enteritis.”
If any animal or plant is microscopic:
Animals, plants, and microscopic entities that are not animals or plants"
Entity" can be replaced by “being” or some other word.
What are you writing? Why not just say, “Animals, plants, and other forms of life.”
The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) faces this problem, because in it he number 579 covers all organisms other than plants and animals (which are classed at 580 and 590 respectively). This is caused by the DDC using the traditional two-kingdom approach when it was created in 1876. Although it has been revised a lot since then, plants and animals remain at 580 and 590.
For each number, DDC has a caption consisting of a word or short phrase to describe the topic. In the case of 579, the caption is “Microorganisms, fungi, algae”. That’s probably as good as you can get in three words, and I doubt if you could make it any shorter.
Although, it does provide a solution in itself: You can now refer to all such organisms as “Dewey Decimal 579”.
What’s more, fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants. So it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to talk about “animals” and “plants” as separate groups while lumping fungi in with everything else. It’d be like saying there are three categories of carnivores: one that includes lions, tigers, and panthers; one that contains wolves, coyotes, and dogs; and one that contains all other carnivores, including cheetahs.
Look at this tree from the Wikipedia link I posted at #2. As you will note, plants, animals and fungi are a little cluster way off to the side of the tree. There is no logical grouping that contains plants and animals but does not include fungi. It is like asking for a term that includes *all *birds except for canaries and ducks.
(ETA sorta like what MikeS said.)
This doesn’t work. As already pointed out, Fungi are multicellular and macroscopic, but are neither plants nor animals. And s I mentioned, some members of the Plantae, the unicellular Green Algae, are microscopic. Some muliticellular members of the Animalia are microscopic, including dust mites, water fleas, copepods, rotifers, and nematodes. Myxozoans are microscopic parasites consisting of only a few cells that appear to be evolved from jellyfish.
I suppose you could more-or-less accurately say ‘animals, plants, fungi, and everything else’. Keeping in mind that ‘everything else’ covers a whole lot of territory and most of the world’s life forms.
“eukaryotes and everything else” seems more useful.
Let me give this one a try.
Is it true that:
All living entities larger than
microscopic are animals or plants.
Equivalent:
Only animals and plants are
living entities that are larger
than microscopic.
At least these avoids the issue of there being some animals and plants that are microscopic. The above claims do not deny this.They say nothing about ALL animals and plants, but only about all living entities larger than microscopic. That there are microscopic animals and plants is irrelevant to these claims.
Are the claims true?
Many thanks
S.J. Estes
No, the claims fail. Fungi are not animals and they are not plants, and many of them are macroscopic.
And “microscopic” depends on what you mean. Yes, and individual bacterium is microscopic. But colonies of bacteria can often be macroscopic.
Wrong. As has already been pointed out, fungi are macroscopic, and are neither animals nor plants. And there are even some single-celled organisms visible to the naked eye, as well as multicellular protists. The amoeba Chaos carolinense can reach 5 mm in length, and there are some multinucleate deep-sea amoebas that can be up to 20 mm. Plasmodium slime molds are also single cells and macroscopic, and cellular slime molds produce multicellular reproductive bodies. More impressively, kelp, a kind of brown alga, can reach 60 m in length. Brown and red algae are multicellular and macroscopic, but they are not members of the Plantae and hence are not technically plants.
I’m not sure what the need for such a term would be. It’s like asking for a word that would include all the countries of the world except for the US and Canada.
Given the relative numbers of plants/animals vs. all other organisms, it’s more like asking for a word that includes all countries except Liechtenstein and Tuvalu.
Nummulites are gone, but their shells remain.
(ETA I see that there are still some barely macroscopic nummulites around, but not nearly as big as they once were.
I just submit that The Carolina Chaos needs to be the name of a sports team, if it isn’t already.
The team logo (an amorphous blob about 5 mm long) needs some work though. 
So sorry. I could have saved a lot of hassle by better wording my question. Let’s try this.
“What is the point past which all larger living
entities are animals or plants”?
The answer can’t be “microscopic” because some one-cell entities are neither plant nor animal, but are visible to the naked eye.
So, perhaps, the answer is that all living entities larger than one-cell entities are animals or plants.
But what about fungus and amoeba.
Well, if I am not mistaken (and I may well be), a single fungus or amoeba is smaller that a a one-cell entity.
Thus, fungi and amoebas are not really answers to the question. (You don’t need numerous horses or tulips for a horse or tulip to be visible e to the naked eye.)
So, considering this, is it true that “all living entities larger than one-cell entities are animals or planes”?
You are.