Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Describe the organizational features of the simplest multicellular organismsExplain the various body forms and bodily functions of sponges

Hank introduces us to the "simplest" of the animals, complexity-wise: beginning with sponges (whose very inclusion in the list as "animals" has been called into question because they are so simple) and finishing with the most complex molluscs, octopuses and squid. We differentiate them by the number of tissue layers they have, and by the complexity of those layers.

Chapters:
1) Porifera
2) Cnidaria
a) Diploblasts
3) Platyhelminthes
a) Triploblasts
b) Coelom
4) Biolography
5) Nematoda
6) Rotifera
7) Molusca

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Marine sponges are an ecologically important component of the sea floor. In addition to providing a habitat for a diverse array of marine species, they also mediate biogeochemical fluxes by filtering organic matter, facilitating nutrient consumption and release. But while their interaction with picoplankton, bacteria, and archaea has been extensively studied, the interaction of sponges with viral-like particles is poorly understood. A recent study examined this ‘dark matter’ in this ecologically important symbiosis. Researchers assessed nine sponge species from the Great Barrier Reef and seven species from the Red Sea. Viromic sequencing revealed host-specific and site-specific patterns in viral communities. All sponge species were dominated by the bacteriophage order Caudovirales, but large DNA virus families were also represented. While core viral functions were consistent across viromes, putative auxiliary metabolic genes (AMGs) were differentially represented..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.