[Life and environment: from aquatic animals to terrestrial animals and to man]

Whether animals are vertebrates or invertebrates, the problems raised by the invasion of land are common to all who have succeeded--terrestrial worms, mollusks and crustaceans, arachnids, insects, terrestrial vertebrates. Many physiological traits, although supported by quite different morphological structures, are convergent and related to the environmental characteristics. Thus one is led to put terrestrial animals and aquatic animals belonging to very distantly related phyla, and then suggest an ecophysiological transphyletic division of the animal kingdom.