Workbook Pages

Key Ideas

• Every animal must do about nine things to survive and reproduce. Every feature it has serves one of them.
• Nature solves the same problem in many different ways. Legs, wings, and flippers all answer the need to move.
• Behavior is an adaptation too. Nest building and living in groups are adaptations with no body part attached.
• Every adaptation is also a limit. Being built for one place means not being built for another. That place is a species’ niche.
• Plants have their own version of the same list, and where plants can grow decides which animals can live there.

• Adaptation: Any feature of a living thing, in its body or its behavior, that gives it an ability it needs to survive and reproduce.
• Physical adaptation: A body feature that provides an ability, such as quills, flippers, thick fur, or broad grinding molars.
• Behavioral adaptation: Something a living thing does that provides an ability, such as building a nest, migrating, or living in a herd.
• Niche: The particular place and way of living a species is suited to, including its food, its shelter, and its climate.
• Habitat: The place a living thing lives, and everything it gets from that place: food, water, shelter, and space.
• Seed dispersal: The many ways plants move seeds to new ground, since a plant cannot walk.

1. A hummingbird can hover in place, which almost no other bird can do. What does hovering let it eat, and what would it lose if it could not hover?
2. A plant is brought in from another continent and spreads everywhere. What adaptation might it have that the native plants around it do not?
3. People live in the Arctic and in the desert without fur or thick skin. What do we use instead of adaptations, and what does that let us do that other animals cannot?

• The nine-item survival list, paper, and one wild animal that lives near you
• A notebook, a pencil, and two nearby spots that are clearly different
• A notebook and what you already know about your own area