Hey kids, if you held a contest to find the strongest animal in the world, who do you think the winner would be? Would it be an elephant? Or maybe a giant squid? If we made all the animals the same size to make it a fair contest, the winner is an animal that can lift 850 times its own weight. Imagine carrying around 850 of your friends!

Have you guessed it yet? The strongest animal in the world… is a beetle!

Beetles are incredible insects. There are more species of beetle than any other group of living things. In fact, one quarter of all known forms of life on Earth are beetles!

Beetles all share the same basic shape: they have a hard exoskeleton, a body with six legs, and two pairs of wings. The front pair is hard, like a shell, and makes a protective cover over the delicate inner wings.

We can usually tell beetles apart by this hard wing cover. For example, one of the most famous beetles, the ladybird or ladybug, has a red wing cover with black spots. Some wing covers can be extremely beautiful, in glittering metallic colours that make the beetle look like a little jewel. A fun fact about beetles is that they shed this hard outer shell as they grow, and you can find empty shells attached to trees and the undersides of leaves if you look carefully.

The strongest beetle is the rhinocerous beetle, which gets its name from the giant horn at the front of its head. The rhinoceros beetle is actually the strongest animal in the world – it’s the only one capable of lifting 850 times their own weight. Even ants, which are famous for their strength, can only lift 50 times their weight.

One of the scariest looking beetles is the stag beetle. Its jaws are so big that they look just like the antlers on a deer! They eat leaves and bark, but they can also deliver a powerful bite if you try to bother them, so it’s best to leave them alone.

Some beetles even like to swim. Whirlygig beetles swim around on the surface of the water, and spin in circles if they’re frightened. One fun fact about whirlygigs is that if they need to dive underwater, they take a bubble of air with them so that they can stay under!

Some cultures even see beetles as sacred. Scarab beetles are one kind of sacred beetle. Another name for scarab beetles is dung beetles, because they roll up a ball of dung, move it to a protected place, lay their eggs in the dung, and when the eggs hatch, the beetle larvae eat the dung! They live in Egypt where the desert meets the farmland, and this is also the place where Egyptian burials take place. Because of this, and the baby beetles’ habit of popping unexpectedly out of a ball of dung, they came to represent eternal life to the ancient Egyptians. There is even an ancient Egyptian story that says the sun is rolled across the sky by a giant scarab god!

So next time you spot a beetle when you’re out for a walk, stop a moment to give it your respects. After all, beetles can lift more than any other animal, turn into submarines, and roll the sun across the sky: that deserves a round of applause!

Post by Sarah

Hey kids, have you ever played hide-and-seek? Imagine if you could stand in plain sight, but nobody could ever find you! That’s the way some animals live every day.

When an animal has colours and markings to help it blend in with something or look like something else, it’s called camouflage. Camouflaged animals are masters of disguise!

Blending In

One kind of camouflage helps some animals blend in with their backgrounds. This is handy for predators because it lets them sneak up on their prey, and it’s useful for prey because it means that their predators can’t see them!

One animal that is really good at camouflage is an arctic fox – they actually change their disguises! Arctic foxes are brown in the summer, but turn white in the winter. This is because in the winter time, it snows. The fox’s brown coat lets it blend in with grass and trees, but its white coat is excellent at helping it hide in the snow.

Crab spiders are deadly masters of disguise. They like to eat insects that feed on flowers, so certain kinds of crab spiders are coloured to match the flower they live on! They lie in wait, looking just like extra petals on the flower, until an unsuspecting bee or butterfly comes along. Then they pounce!

Sea dragons are relatives of seahorses, but their bodies are covered by dozens of leafy growths. These growths aren’t for swimming – they’re for making the sea dragon look just like a frond of leafy seaweed!

There are even some insects that are shaped to look like parts of the plants that they live on. Leafhoppers are small insects whose green wings fold up on their backs to make them look just like a leaf growing out of a twig. Stick insects have long, knobby brown bodies, and look just like sticks on a plant. They are so good at disguising themselves that they will even stretch their legs out in front of them and sway back and forth, just like a twig would in a breeze!

Master Mimics

Other kinds of animals aren’t camouflaged to blend in with their backgrounds – they’re camouflaged to look just like another animal instead.

Many kinds of spiders eat ants, and their bodies are shaped to copy, or mimic, the shape of the ant. Some spider use this disguise to help them hunt ants, but the ants usually can’t be fooled; their sense of smell is too good. Instead, most ant-mimic spiders use their disguise to hide from predators who want to eat them. There is even one kind of ant-mimic spider that looks just like one ant carrying another!

Everyone knows you shouldn’t bother a bee. Some flies take advantage of this by taking on the colours and shapes of different kinds of bees and wasps. Even though they’re harmless, predators mistake them for the more dangerous insects and leave them alone.

Next time you’re looking up science online, try looking up some of these amazing animals and see if you can spot them. And remember to look carefully next time you walk through the woods. There may be life all around you, hidden and in disguise!

Post by Sarah