Terrestrial animal

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Terrestrial animals are animals that live predominantly or entirely on land (e.g. cats, chickens, ants, most spiders), as compared with aquatic animals (e.g. fish, whales, octopuses, lobsters, etc.), who live predominantly or entirely in bodies of water; and semiaquatic animals (e.g.crocodilians, seals, platypus and most amphibians), who inhabit coastal, riparian or wetland areas and rely on both aquatic and terrestrial habitats. While most insects (who constitute over half of all known species in the animal kingdom^[1][2]) are terrestrial, some groups, such as mosquitoes and dragonflies, spend their egg and larval stages in water but emerge as fully terrestrial adults after completing metamorphosis.

In a narrower sense, the word "terrestrial" is used to specifically describe animals that live on the ground (particularly those living obligately on the soil surface), as opposed to arboreal animals that live in trees, even though trees, like the shrubs and groundcovers from the lower layers, are all an integral component of the terrestrial ecosystem.