What Animals Eat
Follow the food from the sun up Plant-Eaters & Meat-Eaters · The Hunters · Staying Off the Menu · The Food Chain · Nature's Clean-Up Crew · Everything Is Connected. Almost all the food on Earth begins with the sun — plants catch its light, and every animal, in the end, is really living on sunshine.
Ages 7–10
What's inside
Plant-Eaters & Meat-Eaters — three ways to fill your tummy
Every animal has to eat to stay alive, but they don't all eat the same things. In fact, there are three main types of eater in the animal world, and once you know them, you'll understand a huge amount about how any animal lives.
The Hunters — built to catch their food
For a meat-eater, dinner doesn't sit still and wait to be eaten — it runs, flies, swims and hides. That means hunters, which scientists call predators, need to be really good at catching their food, and nature has given them some of the most impressive tools and skills of any animals on Earth.
Staying Off the Menu — how the hunted survive
If some animals are the hunters, then others must be the hunted. An animal that gets eaten by a predator is called its prey. But prey animals are far from helpless — over millions of years they've come up with a whole toolkit of brilliant ways to avoid ending up as someone's dinner.
The Food Chain — who eats whom, in order
So plant-eaters eat plants, and meat-eaters eat the plant-eaters. If you line all that up in order, you get something called a food chain — a simple way of showing who eats whom, and how the energy in food is passed from one living thing to the next.
Nature's Clean-Up Crew — the eaters of leftovers
There's one more group of eaters, and they do a job that nobody else wants but everybody needs. When an animal dies, or a plant rots, or another creature leaves its leftovers behind, who cleans it all up? Meet nature's clean-up crew — the eaters of everything that's left over.
Everything Is Connected — one great web of life
A single food chain — grass, rabbit, fox — is a neat and simple story. But real nature is much richer and messier than that. In a real meadow, the fox eats rabbits but also mice and birds, the rabbit is eaten by foxes and owls and hawks, and so on. When you join all these overlapping chains together, you get something magnificent: a food web.
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