- published: 15 Jan 2016
- views: 550
In biology, a colony refers to individual organisms of the same species living closely together, usually for mutual benefit, such as stronger defense or the ability to attack bigger prey. Some insects (ants and honey bees, for example) live only in colonies. The Portuguese man o' war is an example of a colony of four different polyp forms.
A colony of single-cell organisms is known as a colonial organism. Colonial organisms were probably the first step toward multicellular organisms via natural selection.[citation needed] The difference between a multicellular organism and a colonial organism is that individual organisms from a colony can, if separated, survive on their own, while cells from a multicellular lifeform (e.g., cells from a brain) cannot. Volvox (technically a coenobium) is an example of the border between these two states.
A bacterial colony is defined as a visible cluster of bacteria growing on the surface of or within a solid medium, presumably cultured from a single cell. Because all organisms within the colony descend from a single ancestor, they are genetically identical (except for mutations that occur at a low, unavoidable frequency, as well as the more likely possibility of contamination). Obtaining such genetically identical organisms (or pure strains) can be useful in many cases; this is done by spreading bacteria on a culture plate and starting a new stock of bacteria from a single colony.
File:Trust and Non-Self-Governing Territories.djvu
In politics and history, a colony is a territory under the immediate political control of a state. For colonies in antiquity, city-states would often found their own colonies. Some colonies were historically countries, while others were territories without definite statehood from their inception. The metropolitan state is the state that owns the colony. In Ancient Greece, the city that founded a colony was called the metropolis. Mother country is a reference to the metropolitan state from the point of view of citizens who live in its colony. There is a United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories.
A colony is mostly ruled by another state or can be run independently. Unlike a puppet state or satellite state, a colony has no independent international representation, and its top-level administration is under direct control of the metropolitan state.
The term "informal colony" is used by some historians to describe a country which is under the de facto control of another state, although this description is often contentious.
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines. Among the most important topics are five unifying principles that can be said to be the fundamental axioms of modern biology:
Subdisciplines of biology are recognized on the basis of the scale at which organisms are studied and the methods used to study them: biochemistry examines the rudimentary chemistry of life; molecular biology studies the complex interactions of systems of biological molecules; cellular biology examines the basic building block of all life, the cell; physiology examines the physical and chemical functions of the tissues, organs, and organ systems of an organism; and ecology examines how various organisms interact and associate with their environment.
The term biology is derived from the Greek word βίος, bios, "life" and the suffix -λογία, -logia, "study of." It appears in German (as biologie) as early as 1791, and may be a back-formation from the older word amphibiology (meaning the study of amphibians) by deletion of the initial amphi-.