invertebrate tier list
posted aug 2023
One of the only non-CS courses I loved in high school was BL4401# Functional Adaptations of Invertebrates and Vertebrates.
The course content was exactly what I liked about biology — discovering cool facts about the cool stuff living around us1! I also was taught a lot of this content by a senior back when I was in Year One, and that experience influenced a lot of my thoughts on autodidacticism that I still hold today.
A recent trip to the Exploratorium reminded me of how much I loved learning about these animals despite me not having touched biology since ~2019, so here is a completely meaningless and useless tier list of invertebrates that I learned about in that course.
| Tier | Phylum |
|---|---|
| S | Platyhelminthes (cute to draw, especially Planarians) Echinodermata (i like the name sand dollar) |
| A | Cnidaria (medusa vs polyp forms are cool) Porifera (spongebob_irl) Chordata (the lancelets) (still what i picture when recalling the 4 characteristics) |
| B | Chordata (tunicates) (idk it’s like porifera++) |
| C | Nematoda (inferior worm but the only pseudocoelomate we learned) |
| D | Annelida (inferior worm) Arthropoda (nobody likes you but you serve an ecological purpose) |
| F | Mollusca (allergic to most of you also just boring af) |
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As opposed to things like memorising the Glycolysis pathway or FGF signalling behaviour ↩︎