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> Animals (also called Metazoa) are multicellular eukaryotic organisms that form the biological kingdomAnimalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic ma

> Animals (also called Metazoa) are multicellular eukaryotic organisms that form the biological kingdomAnimalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material... Assumes that meant living things? Other things doing it too doesn't make a different, definitions we use for words are gonna have grey zones, such is the reality of compression.

akiselev 6y ago
"Organic material" as in organic chemistry as in compounds that form carbon-hydrogen bonds - stuff made up mostly of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and the halogens. The correct term is heterotrophic but even that is a fuzzy distinction because many (if not most) plants require symbiotic bacterial/fungi colonies due to nitrogen depletion and there are plenty of parasitic plants that can't produce their own nutrition. Clean classification of such abstract groups after billions of years of evolution is impossible.