Chapter 9

Protists and Fungi

9.1 Lesson 9.1: Protists.

Lesson Objectives

• Explain why protists cannot be classified as plants, animals, or fungi.


• List the similarities that exist between most protists.


• Identify the three subdivisions of the organisms in the kingdom Protista.

Check Your Understanding

• What are some basic differences between a eukaryotic cell and a prokaryotic cell?


• List some characteristics that all cells have.

Introduction

So what’s a protist? Is it an animal or plant? Protists are organisms that belong to
the kingdom Protista. These organisms, alleukaryotesand mostlyunicellular,do not
fit neatly into any of the other kingdoms. You can think about protists as all eukaryotic
organisms that are neither animals, nor plants, nor fungi. Even among themselves, they have
verylittleincommon–verysimplestructuralorganizationandalackofspecializedstructures
are all that unify them as a group. Although the termprotistawas coined by Ernst Haeckel
in 1866, the kingdom Protista was not an accepted classification in the scientific world until
the 1960s.