Kingdom Monera

Monerans were first discovered under a light microscope by a Dutch scientist, Antonie van
Leeuwenhoek. In 1676, van Leeuwenhoek observed water closely and was surprised to see
tiny organisms - the first bacteria observed by man. He so improved the quality of the
microscope that some people still think he invented the instrument. His discoveries included
various species of bacteria and spermatozoa (due to this, he is called the father of
microbiology.)

However, Van Leeuwenhoek did not fully understand his discovery. He called the bacteria
“animalcules” and assigned them to class Vermes of Kingdom Animalia. He studied them by
isolating them from different sources, such as rainwater, pond and well water, and the human
mouth and intestine. He also calculated their sizes.
Due to lack of tools and technology, the description of Monera and their classification was
extremely limited. In this era, monerans were not given much importance.
In 1866, most microorganisms were included in kingdom Protista by Ernst Haeckel. He was a
German biologist as well as an artist, who discovered thousands of new species and mapped a
genealogical tree, called the ‘great oak’ for all living animals. He published a book containing
over 100 detailed illustrations of animals and sea creatures (Kunstformen der Natur, "Art
Forms of Nature"). Haeckel was also a supporter of evolution. He promoted and popularised
Charles Darwin's work in Germany (The Origin of Species).
One of his eight major divisions of Protista was composed of the monerans (called Moneres
by Haeckel), which he defined as completely structureless and homogeneous organisms,
consisting only of a piece of plasma. Haeckel's Monera included not only bacterial groups,
but also several small eukaryotic organisms; in fact the genus Vibrio is the only bacterial
genus officially assigned to the phylum, while others are mentioned indirectly.
Although Haeckel's ideas are important to the history of evolutionary theory, many concepts
that he introduced are now considered incorrect. For example, Haeckel described and named
hypothetical ancestral microorganisms that have never been found. He was considered a
flamboyant man, who sometimes took non-scientific leaps from available evidence.
This led Herbert Copeland to speculate that Haeckel considered all bacteria to belong to the
genus Vibrio, ignoring other bacterial genera. (One exception were the Cyanobacteria, which
were placed in the phylum Archephyta of Algae.)
Copeland is responsible for officially raising Monera to kingdom status. He was an American
chemist who dedicated his life to the classification of ‘lower organisms’, and who also wrote
a book on this topic. His four-kingdom scheme (Monera, Protoctista, Animalia, and Plantae)
clearly separated microbes with nuclei (Protoctista) from those without (Monera- he
included bacteria and one of the most primitive organisms, called blue green algae, under this
kingdom.). The main drawback of this system is that fungi are not properly placed.

German botanist Ferdinand Cohn was the first scientist who believed that bacteria should be
classified as plants, due to their similarity with algae. He also suggested that there was no
genetic relationship between bacteria and the fungi with which they were often grouped.
Cohn studied plant nutrition and concluded that bacteria obtained their nitrogen from simple
ammonia compounds, much like green plants. However, they were unable to take their
carbon from carbonic acid, using carbohydrates and their derivatives instead. He also found
that bacteria could be frozen without being killed. When thawed, they then returned to their
former state. He discovered that most bacteria would die if heated to 80 degrees Celsius. In
1876, Cohn proved that endospores in Bacillus subtilis were capable of germinating to form
new bacilli.
The Neolatin noun Monera and the German noun Moneren/Moneres are derived from the
ancient Greek noun moneres which Haeckel states to mean "simple", however it actually
means "single, solitary". Haeckel also describes the protist genus Monas in the two pages
about Monera in his 1866 book.
The term Monera became well established in the 20s and 30s. In 1925 Édouard Chatton
divided all living organisms into two empires (Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes): the Kingdom
Monera being the sole member of the Prokaryotes Empire.
The anthropic importance of the crown group of animals, plants and fungi was hard to
depose. Consequently, several other megaclassification schemes ignored on the empire rank
but maintained the kingdom Monera consisting of bacteria, such Copeland in 1938 and
Whittaker in 1969.
Robert Whittaker, an American plant ecologist, was the first to propose the five-kingdom
taxonomic classification. Whittaker's system placed most single celled organisms into either
the prokaryotic Monera or the eukaryotic Protista. The other three kingdoms in his system
were the eukaryotic Fungi, Animalia, and Plantae. Whittaker, however, did not believe that
all his kingdoms were monophyletic. This classification was only a minor part of his work; he
was more interested in plant communities.
In 1977, a PNAS paper by Carl Woese and George Fox demonstrated that the archaea
(initially called archaebacteria) are not significantly closer in relationship to the bacteria than
they are to eukaryotes. The paper received front-page coverage in The New York Times, and
caused a great controversy. The conclusions were accepted later, leading to replacement of
the kingdom Monera with the two kingdoms Bacteria and Archaea.
Bacteria and Archaea are similar. For example, they do not have intracellular organelles, and
they have circular DNA. However, they are also fundamentally distinct, and have different
evolutionary lineages and structures. Members of these two prokaryotic domains are as
different from one another as they are from eukaryotic cells.
A minority of scientists, including Thomas Cavalier-Smith, continue to reject the widely
accepted division between these two groups. Cavalier-Smith has published classifications in
which the archaebacteria are part of a subkingdom of the Kingdom Bacteria.
In recent years (2005), under the seven kingdom classification, archaebacteria and eubacteria
are recognised as separate kingdoms and are named Protomonera and Monera respectively.