How Animals Live
Tap a card to see how they solve it Staying warm · Finding food · Hiding · Long journeys · Talking to each other · Animals that use tools · Families and helpers · Sleeping and hibernating · Senses we do not have · Living alongside us.
Ages 7–10
What's inside
Staying warm — the heat problem
Being alive means running a small fire inside your body, and a fire has to be looked after. A fox in a blizzard, a penguin in the dark of winter and an elephant at noon are all working on the same puzzle from different ends: keep the heat in, or get the heat out. None of their answers is a coat you can take off.
Finding food — the energy problem
Nothing an animal does is free. Growing, running, healing and even thinking all spend energy, and the only place to get more is from something that was alive. So the shape of an animal is mostly the shape of its dinner: look at a mouth and you can usually guess the meal.
Hiding — the not-being-eaten problem
Most animals spend their whole lives being edible. The cheapest answer is not to be seen at all, and that turns out to be a design problem with dozens of separate solutions — matching the background, breaking up your own outline, standing perfectly still, or shouting a warning so loud that nobody bothers you.
Long journeys — the moving-home problem
Sometimes the answer to a hard season is not to endure it but to leave. Millions of animals do exactly that every year, crossing oceans, deserts and mountain ranges on a schedule nobody wrote down, and the astonishing part is not the distance. It is that they arrive.
Talking to each other — the message problem
Getting an idea out of one head and into another is hard even for us, and animals manage it without a single word. They use sound, smell, movement, light and touch, and the message is usually short and useful: danger here, food that way, this is mine, come closer.
Animals that use tools — the out-of-reach problem
For a long time people said that using tools was the one thing only humans did. That turned out to be wrong, and the animals that proved it were not the ones anyone expected. What counts as a tool is simple: an object an animal picks up and uses to do a job its body cannot do alone.
Families and helpers — the keeping-babies-alive problem
A newborn animal is the most fragile thing in any landscape, and every species has a plan for that. Some make thousands of eggs and walk away; some make one baby and defend it for a decade; and a few have worked out something in between, where the whole group helps raise young that are not their own.
Sleeping and hibernating — the empty-season problem
Every animal has to switch off sometimes, and switching off is dangerous when something is hunting you. Winter makes it worse, because the food simply stops. The answers range from a nap with half a brain to shutting the whole body down until spring.
Senses we do not have — the invisible-world problem
Your eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin give you a version of the world, and it is only a version. Other animals pick up things you cannot detect at all: magnetism, electricity, heat as a picture, colours past the end of the rainbow, and echoes used as sight. This is the strangest idea in this whole world, and every bit of it is measured.
Living alongside us — the shared-world problem
People have built a new kind of landscape out of stone, glass, light and noise, and a surprising number of animals have moved straight into it. Some are struggling. Others are doing better here than in the countryside, and watching which is which tells you a great deal about what animals actually need.
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