What Is Kingdom Protista?

Imagine you are cleaning or organizing around your house. To assist in this process, you separate your
items into categories to help you locate them later. Maybe you have a box for books, a drawer for
school supplies, and a cubby for electronics. You start to realize, however, that you have a bunch of
extra bits and pieces that do not fit into any of your other groups. So, you create a special container for
them: your 'other' container. This is pretty much what happened with Kingdom Protista.

All the life on planet Earth is organized into five kingdoms based on whether or not the organism is
single-celled, how it obtains energy, and how (or if) it moves. Kingdom Protista is the hodge-podge
category. It contains the protists, or the organisms that do not fit into any of the other categories.

Protista is Greek for the very first. These organisms were traditionally considered the first eukaryotic
forms of life, predecessors to the organisms in the plant, animal, and fungus kingdoms. Eukaryotes are
organisms whose cells have membrane-bound organelles. This is opposed to prokaryotes, single-celled
organisms lacking a nucleus.

Characteristics of Protists

Protists are eukaryotic organisms that cannot be classified as a plant, animal, or fungus. They are mostly
unicellular, but some, like algae, are multicellular. Kelp, or 'seaweed,' is a large multicellular protist that
provides food, shelter, and oxygen for numerous underwater ecosystems. Even though kelp resembles a
plant, it is not classified into Kingdom Plantae because it lacks the cellular complexity of plant cells.

Protists can be heterotrophic, which means they obtain the energy they need to live by consuming other
organisms. Or, they can be autotrophic, which means they obtain energy from the environment through
photosynthesis, the process of capturing light energy and storing it in carbohydrates.

Protists primarily live in water, though some live in moist soil. They can be found almost anywhere on
Earth where there is liquid water, even in humans.