In hierarchical classification, which category may come first when categories are placed in ascending order ?
Answers
Major Taxonomic Categories
There are 7 major categories, namely the kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. The sequence can be remembered by memorizing the sentence as a pneumonic. ‘Keep sports clean family gets sick’.
(Source: wikieducator)
Category versus Taxon
The category is an abstract term that simply represents a rank or a level. Taxon represents a biological object and is assigned to a category. For example, taxon of birds is aves and the category is class. Taxonomy of sponges is peripheral and the category is phylum. On classifying an organism in a particular taxon, we should have basic knowledge of characters of the individual group.
Species
Species is a group of actually or potentially inbreeding population reproductively isolated from other such groups. It is the lowest taxonomic characteristics. It consists of individuals which have fundamental similarities and can be distinguished from other closely related species due to distinct morphological characters.
For example, term ‘indica’ in Mangifera indica represent the specific epithet, whereas the first term Mangifera represent another higher level of taxon called genus. Each genus may have one or more than one specific epithet representing different organism for example genus Panthera can have Leo as one specific epithet representing lion and Tigris as another specific epithet representing tiger.