Animals

Stopping something from rotting

How Does Skin Become Leather?

Leather is animal skin treated so its fibres cannot rot, staying flexible and tough for years.

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A caterpillar's sleeping bag

Where Does Silk Come From?

Silk is one long thread a caterpillar spins to make its cocoon, unwound whole and woven into cloth.

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It is mostly trapped air

Why Is Wool So Warm?

Wool keeps you warm because its kinked fibres trap still air, and still air is very bad at carrying heat away.

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Rock replacing bone

How Does a Fossil Form?

Fossils form when minerals slowly replace buried bone, copying its shape in stone.

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Plants moving without moving

How Do Seeds Travel?

Seeds travel by wind, water, animals or launching, because plants cannot move.

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Rock, remains and life

What Is Dirt Actually Made Of?

Soil is ground-up rock mixed with decayed remains, air, water and more living things than you would believe.

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Being eaten by the invisible

Why Do Dead Things Rot?

Rotting is microbes eating dead matter and returning its nutrients to the soil.

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Energy passed along

Who Eats Whom?

A food chain follows energy from sunlight through plants and animals.

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Living things too small to see

What Are Germs?

Germs are microscopic organisms that multiply in your body and cause illness.

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A reflex for fur you lost

Why Do You Get Goosebumps?

Goosebumps are tiny muscles pulling your hairs upright, a leftover reflex from furry ancestors.

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Guess everything, keep what works

How Does Your Body Fight a New Germ?

Your immune system makes millions of random shapes in advance, then mass-produces whichever one happens to fit the invader.

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A recipe, copied twice

Why Do You Look Like Your Parents?

You inherit half your instructions from each parent, shuffled into a brand new combination.

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Drowning out one signal with another

Why Does Scratching Feel So Good?

Itch travels on its own slow nerves, and scratching drowns it out with pain signals your spinal cord prioritises.

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Pollen reaching the right place

What Is Pollination?

Pollination is pollen moving between flowers so that seeds can be made.

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A rehearsal

How Do Vaccines Work?

Vaccines train your immune system on a harmless preview of a germ.

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A filter, not a plan

Why Do Animals Fit Where They Live?

Animals fit their homes because the variations that survived best got passed on, over and over.

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Chemical trails

How Do Ants Find Food?

Ants find food by laying scent trails that automatically favour the shortest path.

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Shouting at the world and listening back

How Does a Bat See in the Dark?

A bat finds its way by shouting and timing the echoes — and it is the only mammal that truly flies.

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A deal, not a favour

Why Do Bees Visit Flowers?

Bees visit flowers for food, and carry pollen between them as payment.

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One animal in every four

Why Are There So Many Kinds of Beetle?

Beetles are the most numerous kind of animal on Earth, and a pair of armoured wing cases is a large part of why.

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Everything about it is built for lightness

How Does a Bird Stay Up?

A bird flies on curved wings that bend passing air downwards, carried by hollow bones and enormous chest muscles.

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Instinct plus practice

How Do Birds Build Nests?

Birds build nests by instinct, and improve at it with practice.

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Rebuilt from the inside

How Does a Caterpillar Become a Butterfly?

A caterpillar dissolves inside its chrysalis and is rebuilt as a butterfly.

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Breaking up the outline

How Does Camouflage Work?

Camouflage works by breaking up an animal's outline so no shape is recognised.

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Both, in a way

Is Coral a Rock or an Animal?

Coral is a colony of tiny animals living inside a stone skeleton they build.

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Legs that bend the wrong way

Why Does a Crab Walk Sideways?

A crab walks sideways because its leg joints only hinge side to side — going sideways is the fast way, not the odd way.

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A comb and a scraper

How Does a Cricket Chirp?

A cricket sings by scraping a row of ridges on one wing with a hard edge on the other, and hears with its knees.

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Reading bones

How Do We Know About Dinosaurs?

We know dinosaurs from fossils, read by comparison with living animals.

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A pond in a box

Why Do Animals Lay Eggs?

An egg carries water, food and air for a growing animal inside a shell strong enough to sit on and thin enough to breathe through.

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A nose with forty thousand muscles

What Can an Elephant Do With Its Trunk?

An elephant's trunk is a boneless nose and upper lip with tens of thousands of muscles, used to breathe, drink, grab, smell and talk.

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One structure, many jobs

Why Do Birds Have Feathers?

Feathers are branching structures that zip into light, stiff sheets for flight, warmth and display.

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Taking oxygen out of water

How Do Fish Breathe Underwater?

Fish use gills to pull dissolved oxygen out of the water flowing past.

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Two lives, one animal

Why Do Frogs Start as Tadpoles?

Frogs start as water-adapted tadpoles and rebuild into land-adapted adults.

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Holding onto still air

Why Do Animals Have Fur?

Fur works by trapping a layer of still air against the skin, and animals fluff it, shed it and grow it back as the seasons change.

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Seven bones, same as yours

Why Is a Giraffe's Neck So Long?

A giraffe reaches leaves nothing else can, and needs an extraordinary heart and valves to pump blood that high.

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Turning the engine down

Why Do Animals Hibernate?

Hibernating animals slow their whole body down to survive winter without food.

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Sticky feet and a very fast eye

How Does a Fly Walk on the Ceiling?

A fly sticks to ceilings with clawed, glue-footed pads, sees the world far faster than you do, and tastes with its feet.

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No brain, no heart, no bones

How Does a Jellyfish Live With No Brain?

A jellyfish has no brain, heart, bones or blood — a ring of nerves and a bag of water do the whole job.

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Getting your energy back

Why Does a Kangaroo Hop?

A kangaroo's tendons store and return energy like springs, so hopping costs it barely more at speed than at a crawl.

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Following the food

Why Do Birds Migrate?

Birds migrate to follow food supplies that move with the seasons.

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It is not the bite, it is you

Why Does a Mosquito Bite Itch?

A mosquito's spit stops your blood clotting so it can drink — and your reaction to that spit is the itch.

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A very old rule, badly broken

Why Do Moths Fly Into Lights?

Moths navigate by keeping a distant light at a fixed angle — a rule that works with the moon and fails badly with a lamp.

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A whole second shift

Why Do Some Animals Only Come Out at Night?

Night-living animals avoid heat, hide from daytime hunters, and get the food that daytime animals leave alone.

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Skin that works like a screen

How Does an Octopus Change Colour?

An octopus changes colour with millions of tiny colour bags in its skin, squeezed open and shut by muscle.

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Hearing in three dimensions

How Do Owls Hunt in the Dark?

Owls hunt by sound, using lopsided ears to pinpoint prey in total darkness.

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Four layers and a good idea

How Do Penguins Stay Warm in the Snow?

Penguins beat the cold with packed feathers, a fat layer, a clever blood trick in the feet, and taking turns in a huddle.

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Senses you do not have

How Does a Shark Find Its Food?

Sharks hunt with a stack of senses — smell, ripples, and electricity — that reach far past what eyes can do.

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One foot, one shell, no hurry

How Does a Snail Carry Its House?

A snail glides on a single muscular foot over a trail of slime, inside a shell that grew from its own body.

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A whole body doing the work of feet

How Does a Snake Move With No Legs?

A snake moves by pressing its body against the ground and pushing sideways, with ribs and scales doing the work of legs.

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Only some threads are glued

Why Don't Spiders Stick to Their Own Webs?

Spiders avoid sticking because only some web threads are coated in glue.

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Thousands of hiding places

How Does a Squirrel Find Its Buried Nuts?

A squirrel remembers roughly where it buried each nut, then finds the exact spot by smell — and the ones it forgets become trees.

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An animal built the wrong way round

How Does a Starfish Grow a New Arm?

A starfish walks on hundreds of tiny water-powered feet, has no brain or blood, and can regrow a lost arm.

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Nobody is in charge

How Does a Flock Turn All at Once?

A flock, shoal or swarm moves as one because each animal follows a few simple rules about its nearest neighbours.

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One part, a dozen jobs

What Is a Tail For?

Tails do whatever an animal most needs — steering, balancing, gripping, signalling or keeping warm.

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It depends on who does the delivering

Is Venom the Same as Poison?

Venom is injected by the animal, poison is only dangerous if you eat or touch the animal — and both are made of the same kinds of chemicals.

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The biggest animal there has ever been

Why Is a Whale Not a Fish?

Whales are warm air-breathers that feed their babies milk, which makes them nothing like the fish they swim beside.

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Free soil engineering

Why Are Earthworms Useful?

Earthworms improve soil by eating dead matter, mixing layers and making tunnels.

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