By Julie Brown, National Geographic’s Great Nature Project Winter time in the northern hemisphere is a great time to observe animal behavior and work on your species identification skills. When the trees are bare and snow comes and goes from the landscape, it is easier to see organisms whose physical appearance starkly contrasts with their habitat. Birds are easier to see without the cover of … Continue reading Creature Feature: Cardinal Colors
This post was written by guest blogger Ginger Allington. Can you guess where this grassland is located? The grassland above is in Arizona . . . in a desert. When many people think of a desert, they think of sand dunes and tall spiny cacti. However, deserts are home to an amazing diversity of plants and animals. These living things are adapted to the dry, … Continue reading Where Did the Grassland Go?
By Erin Connelly and Jen Schill of the Biomimicry Institute Have you ever wondered how hermit crabs are able to find perfectly sized shells as they grow bigger and bigger? Most hermit crabs can be as small as a few millimeters but can grow up to a few inches in length. That’s quite a big difference! Luckily, some of these organisms have found an ingenious … Continue reading Creature Feature: House Hunting, Hermit Crab-Style
scavenger (SKA-vehn-jur) noun. organism that eats dead or rotting biomass, such as animal flesh or plant material. A scavenger is an organism that mostly consumes decaying biomass, such as meat or rotting plant material. Many scavengers are a type of carnivore, which is an organism that eats meat. While most carnivores hunt and kill their prey, scavengers usually consume animals that have either died of natural causes … Continue reading Word of the Week: scavenger
There are more than 1,200 species of bats around the world, all of which fall into one of two big groups: megabats and microbats. You can probably guess which ones are typically– though not always– larger! Megabats include all of the fruit and nectar bats in Asia, Africa, Australia, Middle East, and Oceania. Microbats include all of the insect-eating bats, as well as a large, … Continue reading Featured Creatures: Nectar Bats
