Publication at Faculty of Science |
2012
Abstract
The insect parasites treated in this chapter are a broadly diverse group of unicellular eukaryotic organisms belonging to the previous conventional taxon Protozoa, believed to represent a stem taxon at the base of multicellular organisms (Whittaker, 1969). In recent classifications of organisms, the existence of Protozoa is either not recognized (Adl et al., 2005, Walker et al., 2011) or exists in a modified form that includes only a fraction of organisms formerly recognized in the taxon (Cavalier-Smith, 2010).
Protists representing most of the former Protozoa are now distributed in six kingdoms (or supergroups) to which all eukaryotic organisms on Earth belong. These groups are relatively well supported by molecular phylogeny.