They are plants that have roots, stems (rhizomes) and flowers. They draw mineral salts from the substrate through their roots. They come from terrestrial plants.

Flatworms are distinguished by their flattened shape, their gillless backs and their very fine (and therefore fragile) properties. They breathe directly through the skin, and rarely exceed 5 cm in length. Many eyelashes line their underside, allowing them to move around. Annelids are worms made up of circular rings that are all identical; they allow the annelids to reconstruct an individual from one ring. Among them we find spirographs which live in a calcareous or mucus tube lined with sand. Their last segment bears a plume of gills that is used for both food gathering and respiration. Echiurians are worms classified with annelids, but do not exhibit body segmentation. Among them, the bonellia is a strange phenomenon with a T-shaped proboscis about one meter long for the female. This trunk allows the animal to capture its food when her body (10 cm long) remains usually hidden under a stone. The male, who is only 1 to 3 mm long, lives in the body of the female.

A mollusc is an animal with a soft body, possibly with a shell. It consists of a head, a foot, and a visceral mass covered by a mantle that may secrete a shell. The foot is used for fixation and locomotion; it is also a muscle used to capture prey. Beyond these general characteristics, this phylum  contains very different animals such as mussel, slug or octopus.

Most of the time, gastropods carry a spiral shell into which they retreat at the slightest alarm (newt, murex, cone, periwinkle, etc).  The shell is sometimes simplified (abalone, limpet, crepidula, etc) or very reduced (sea hare), or even absent (other slugs).

As their name suggests, bivalves have a shell consisting of two valves connected by a hinge and a ligament. They are sedentary animals that live attached to a hard substrate or to other animals, or buried in the sediment (mussel, oyster, scallop, lime, Noah's ark, clams, mother-of-pearl, etc).

Cephalopods have a foot ending in 8 tentacles (octopods as octopus) or 10 tentacles (decapods as squid and cuttlefish). The tentacles carry suction cups which allow the capture of prey. This is then brought to the mouth, which has a kind of parrot's beak. These highly evolved animals move by reaction and driving water out of a ventral cavity (called a pallial cavity).

They are exclusively marine animals, including starfish, sea urchins, brittle stars, sea cucumbers and comatulas. Although they look very different, they share the same following characteristics: a 5th-order symmetry (sometimes modified by evolution for some species) and an aquifer system that is unique in the animal world. This system provides locomotion and breathing.

These animals may be solitary, social or colonial. They look like an active filtering bag with two orifices: one for entry and one for exit of the water from which they get their food. Some drift in open water and others are attached to substrates (rocks, harbor quays, boat hulls, mollusc shells, etc).

Cartilaginous fishes have a skeleton made of cartilage and not of bone. All sharks, skates, and rays are cartilaginous fishes which belong to the elasmobranch group. They breathe through vents, rather than gills with operculums. These vents are located on top of the head for rays and some sharks. For most of sharks these vents are lateral. Their skin is covered of placoid scales or dermal denticles, tooth-like scales. They look different from the flat scales found on bony fishes.

They are tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrate animals) that live in fresh water (lakes, rivers, ponds) apart from frogs which also live in mangroves. They are not found in the marine environment. There are mainly frogs, but also toads, newts, salamanders...

All animals considered as mammals have an ability to produce milk and are covered with fur, totally or very partially, life-long or only when juveniles. Mammals include families as diverse as cetaceans (whales and dolphins), pinnipeds (seals, walruses, sea lions) and sirenians (dugongs and manatees). They are warm-blooded animals with a constant temperature, breathing oxygen from the air through lungs. Otters and polar bears are also members of aquatic mammals.

DORIS Android is an illustrated guide to underwater species in mainland France and overseas that can be taken "almost" everywhere. It helps to identify and observe marine and freshwater species to make the most of your scuba diving or strolls on the foreshore.

The application can work in online mode (to minimize the occupied disk space) but can also work offline after downloading all the photos of your choice. It can thus be taken on a trip or a boat and be functional even without a network.