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| Insects |
If you could look inside an insect’s
body, you wouldn’t see any bones. But insects do have skeletons! Insects differ from creatures with
back-bones, such as humans, horses, dogs and fishes. These animals have hard skeletons inside
their bodies. Your skeleton is made of bone, and the rest of your body is
shaped around it.
An insect’s skeleton though, is a
tough outer shell. It provides support
and protection for the insect’s soft insides.
Some insects, especially beetles have hard, heavy skeletons. Others, such as butterflies have light, thin
skeleton. – Dick Rogers
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| Elephant and Mice |
It is amusing to think that a tiny
mouse can frighten the huge elephant.
The reason, supposedly, is that a mouse could crawl into the elephant’s
trunk and this might suffocate the elephant.
The truth is, that although mice are often seen running about in an
elephant stall, the elephant shows no fear of them at all.
Since the elephant’s nose is a double
barreled tube, it would be impossible for a mouse to suffocate an elephant by
crawling into its trunk. But should a
mouse ever try, the elephant would simply blow the mouse out with a might
sneeze. – Dick Rogers
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| Spider Web |
Spiders build their webs to trap flies
and other insects for food. An insect is
unable to escape once it has become caught in the spider’s web. The more the insect struggles, the more it
becomes entangled in the sticky threads. A spider’s silk is strong enough that
most insects cannot break through it.
A web-spinning spider does not become
caught in its own web. When walking across
the web, it grasps the silk threads with special hooked claw on each foot. The spider also secretes an oily liquid onto
its legs and feet that prevent the sticky silk from sticking to its body. – Dick Rogers
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| Piranha Fish |
In South American rivers swims one of
the world’s most dangerous fish—the piranha.
This savage fish is only ten or so inches long, but its teeth are so
sharp and its jaws are so strong.
It can chop a piece of flesh from an animal
or a human as neatly as a razor. Piranhas often travel in schools of several
hundred.
Their diet usually consists of other
fish. But if an animal happens to be in
the water near a school of hungry piranhas, they attack and devour it
instantly. Animals as bit as a horse
have been eaten down to a bare skeleton in only a few minutes. – Dick Rogers
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| Corals |
Beneath the surface of the sea lie coral
formations of many shapes and colors.
The formations may look like branching trees tinted green or lavender,
lacy sea fans, or even like tiny organ pipes.
Coral is formed by millions of tiny sea animals called “coral
polyps.” Coral polyps look much like
little flowers.
They wave food into their mouths with
a circle of tiny tentacles. Young coral
polyps attach themselves to older ones and build limy, cup-like skeletons
around their soft bodies. When the
polyps die, their hard skeletons remain as part of the growing coral
formations. – Dick Rogers
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| Shell of a Clam |
If you have ever examined
a clam shell, you may have wondered how the shell got bigger as the clam
grew. A clam is born with a shell just
the right size for its body. Inside the
protecting shell of the living animal is a fleshy layer of tissue called the
“mantle.”
The mantle oozes a limy shell
liquid which quickly hardens and becomes part of the shell. As long as a clam grows, its shell also
grows. The food that a clam eats
provides the minerals that form the shell.
The hard shell serves as a clam’s skeleton, and the soft animal inside
can never leave it.–Dick Rogers
Bees spend the winter
huddled together in their hives. Inside
the hive, the bees move about slowly, eating the extra honey that they stored
during the busy summer season, and buzzing their wings to keep warm. If a bee becomes too cold, it cannot move and
thus, soon dies.
Before the end of
winter, the queen bee begins to lay eggs again, and in the spring, all the busy
activities of the hive are resumed. In
warm climates, however, where there is something in flower the year round,
honeybees remains active, making honey in every season.–Dick Rogers
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| Tikoy - My Dog |
The whiskers on an animal’s face are
organs of touch. They help the animal
sense what going on around it. Scientists
call whiskers vibrissae (vi-BRIS-see).
These long, sensitive hairs are most helpful to animals that prowl about in
dark places.
A cat’s whiskers brush
against objects the cat might not see as it hunts at night. Whiskers help some animals find food. The whiskers on a seal’s face are helpful in
detecting fish in the dark or cloudy water.
And the thick whiskers on a walrus’s upper lip help it to feel for clams
in the ocean bottom.–Dick Rogers
