1. (used with a sing. verb) A theory that explains the global distribution of geological phenomena such as seismicity, volcanism, continental drift, and mountain building in terms of the formation, destruction, movement, and interaction of the earth's lithospheric plates. 2. (used with a sing. or pl. verb) The dynamics of plate movement.
Despite the fact that mollusks are very susceptible to changes in their environment because of their permeable skin and soft body (often with an exoskeleton in the form of a shell), they have adapted to all of the main environments of our planetâmarine, freshwater, and terrestrial. With 41% of the 736 documented extinctions of all animal species, the number of mollusks exceeds that of any other major taxonomic group 3. 2  Most documented endangered mollusk species are non marine (they live in freshwater or terrestrial environments) 5.
Mollusks are members of the phylum mollusca. Mollusks have been evolving in the sea for over 600 million years and there are more than 100 000 mollusks species. The mollusks phylum includes tiny snails, squid, octopus, clams, oysters, abalone, and cuttlefish.They are considered to be the most intelligent of the invertabrate species.he study of mollusks is called malacology. There are four main classes in the phylum mollusca, gastropods, bivalve, cephalopod and Polyplacophora. Gastropods include nudibranches, slugs and snails. They compose over one third of the mollusk group and most are single spiral shells but some have no shells.