When you look at the world around you, how do you categorise or group what you see? One of the broadest groupings is 'living' and 'non-living'. This may sound simple, but it is sometimes difficult to decide whether something is truly alive or not. Here we look at the characteristics of living things – using earthworms as an example.
LOI 1: The life processes that are common to all living things how they occur in different ways.
L4 Living World - Life Processes: Recognise that there are life processes common to all living things and that these occur in different ways.
L4 Living World - Ecology: Explain how living things are suited to their particular habitat and how they respond to environmental changes, both natural and human-induced.
All living things share life processes such as growth and reproduction. Most scientists use seven life processes or characteristics to determine whether something is living or non-living.
The table below describes seven characteristics of most living things and contains references to earthworms to explain why we can definitely say that they are 'living'.
Based on this information, we can confidently categorise earthworms as living things as they carry out all seven life processes.
It is now possible to classify them further into a series of hierarchical categories: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. Classifying living things into these categories is an important way for scientists to show how living things are related to each other. Most scientists classify living things into one of the following six kingdoms.
What did you decide? Sometimes people are surprised to find out that earthworms are actually animals – the same kingdom as humans, cats, dogs, dolphins and spiders! Just as living things share a set of common characteristics, animals have key characteristics that can help you to decide whether a living thing is an animal or not.
Key characteristics of animals include the following:
Read more on the classification system and taxonomy and learn about classifying marine organisms and how scientists classify ferns.
Students can explore their ideas about the characteristics of living things with this graphic organizer, Living or non-living?