Invertebrates

Invertebrate means an animal without an backbone, so all animals without a backbone are grouped in one Sub-phylum being invertebrates.

Of all the millions of species of animal on the earth, invertebrates make up 98% of all animals. These include insects such as cockroaches & stick insects, arachnids such as the spider and scorpion, mollusc's such as the snail as well as many millions of other creatures.

Although invertebrates do not have backbones, they do have a skeleton, their's being on the outside of the body. Some of these skeletons are hard and are called exoskeletons but some are soft - such as the slug - and these are called hydrostatic skeletons.

Invertebrates live almost everywhere in the world, from the bottom of the ocean, to the top of a mountain, to the driest desert & even in your hair. This is because they are versatile and able to adapt to their surroundings.

Invertebrates come in thousands of shapes and sizes and can look totally different from each other, for example, both a jellyfish and a spider are invertebrates, so is a snail and a wasp but they all have on thing in common, they don't have a backbone.

Did you know that...

Biggest - Giant squid grows to around 59 foot.
Smallest - Tanzanian parasitic wasp only 0.2mm.
Fastest - Dragonfly's can fly up to 36MPH.
Most dangerous - The mosquito spreads malaria killing 3 million people a year.

To find out more about the various species of invertebrates that may be covered during our lectures, click on the images.