Muck Diving

Basically this is diving in search of small and unusual creatures which inhabit the sandy bottoms and less attractive seascapes as opposed to diving among the corals and more visually appealing areas.

Why do it? This is where you find many of the fascinating and unusual creatures such as pipefish, seahorses, lionfish, gurnards, frogfish, tube anemones, nudibranchs and other sea slugs.

Macro Photographers love it!

Famous Muck Dive Areas: Mabul Island of Sabah East Malaysia

Critters

A term for creatures. Often used for smaller creatures such as invertebrates. e.g. Funny little critters!

Scientific Classification
This is a means used by biologists to organize each of the organisms on the planet, based primarily on evolutionary similarity as determined by visual observation. This system was devised by Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778).

The system works by placing each organism into a layered hierarchy of groups. Each group at a given layer is composed of a set of groups from the layer directly below. Therefore, in theory, one needs know only the lowest layer (species) of a particular organism in order to uniquely determine the other six layers. In practice, however, many species actually have the same species designation, so when specifiying a species, scientists use the bottom two layers - a system called binomial nomenclature.

The standard groupings (taxa) of taxonomy from most general to most specific are:

• Kingdom
  In biology, a kingdom is the top-level, or nearly the top-level, grouping of organisms in scientific classification. Originally, two kingdoms were distinguished, the Animalia (animals), which typically could move about, and the Plantae (plants), which typically could not. Early authors also had a third kingdom for minerals. Each kingdom was divided into classes, later into phyla for animals and divisions for plants. This simplistic classification has been largely abandoned thanks to new developments, however.
   
• Phylum (animals) or Division (plants)
  The next category is the Phylum. There are several phyla within each kingdom. The phyla start to break the animals (or plants, fungi, etc) into smaller and more recognizable groups. The best known phylum is Chordata, which contains all animals with backbones (fish, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians). There is also Arthropoda (insects, spiders, crustaceans); Mollusca (snails, squid, clam); Annelida (segmented worms); Echinodermata (starfish, sea urchins) and many, many more.
   
• Class
• Order
• Family
• Genus
  Species