Hey kids, do you know where you can find more living things in one place than anywhere else in the world?  In a tropical rainforest!

Rainforests are exactly what their name suggests: warm, dense forests that are very wet.Tropical rainforests are found close to the Earth’s equator, and they are home to millions of plant and animals. In school science, we can learn the four layers of the rainforest.

Towering above all the other parts of the rainforest are emergents: giant trees taller than any other in the rainforest that stick up above their neighbours. Emergents are homes to many birds and insects.

The canopy is the leafy part of the rainforest, made up of the tops of the trees. The canopy grows so thick and close together that rain falling on it can take 10 minutes to reach the ground!  Many amazing plants and animals are found here, including sloths. Sloths have long toes that they use to hang upside down from branches; they spend most of their lives upside-down, and will eat, sleep, and even give birth upside down!  Sloths are also famous for being the slowest animals on earth. They are so slow that algae grows in their fur and turns them green!

Under the canopy but above the ground is the understory of the rainforest. It consists mainly of the trunks of trees and the vines and other plantlife that grows over them. Many flowers grow in the understory, and thousands of birds and butterflies find their food there.

Finally, we reach the lowest part of the rainforest: the forest floor. It is home to millions of insects, and some of the largest animals in the rainforest also live there.

School science tells us that it’s important to preserve the rainforest because of all the plants and animals that live  there, but one of the most interesting facts about rainforests is that the trees also provide much of the air that we breathe! Rainforests are also important because the cures to many illnesses have been found in the plants that grow there.

Here are some other interesting facts about tropical rainforests:

The largest butterfly in the world is the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing butterfly from the rainforests of Papua New Guinea. This massive butterfly has a wingspan of 30 cm, and it’s also poisonous! The caterpillars eat a poisonous rainforest plant, which means that any predators that try to eat a Queen Alexandra’s birdwing get very sick, and soon learn to leave all of them alone.

The rainforests of Sumatra are home to the largest flower in the world – which is also the smelliest.  The corpse flower has a blossom over a metre wide, and it gives off a stench like rotting flesh that can be smelled up to 800 metres away!

The Congo rainforest in Africa has its very own unicorns! Okapi are deerlike animals related to giraffes, with striped legs like a zebra. They have two horns on their heads, but if you look at an okapi from the right angle, the two horns look like one. This earned them their nickname of “African unicorns.”

And the coolest thing about rainforests is that there are so many plants and animals in them that we haven’t discovered them all yet! Maybe you can visit a rainforest and discover a new species someday.

Post by Sarah

Hey kids, what do you think is the most unexplored part of our planet?  It’s not the depths of the rainforest. It’s not the burning deserts. It’s not even the frozen Arctic waste. The most unexplored parts of our planet are our oceans!  We’re just beginning to realize what kind of incredible mysteries are hidden in the deep, dark waters.

Our oceans make up a huge part of our planet – over 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by them! They help control the temperature of the planet, shape the weather, and are home to millions of living things.

The deepest part of our planet is the Mariana trench, near Japan and the Philippines. At it’s deepest point, it reaches 10,924 metres (or 6.78 miles) deep. That means if you were to take Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth, and stick it at the deepest part of this trench, there would still be more than 2 kilometers of water over the top of it!

Fortunately, scientists have invented special deep water research cameras and vehicles that can reach into the cold, dark, high-pressure world of the deep sea. And what we’re starting to discover is that these dark, deep, freezing waters are filled with living things. Go down deep enough, and the living things you find look like aliens from another world; it’s discovering these strange creatures that makes science fun!

Imagine yourself stranded on the bottom of the ocean, with cold black water all around you. Suddenly, you see a light wiggling around in front of you. You’re drawn toward it, and wonder if maybe it’s something good to eat. You reach for it… and find yourself face-to-face with a mouthful of razor sharp teeth! You’ve just met an anglerfish.

An anglerfish is a hunter whose body is camouflaged to look like the floor of the ocean. In the middle of its head is a long tentacle with a sac on the end filled with glowing bacteria. The anglerfish hides itself on the ocean floor, and wiggles its tentacle around. Unsuspectitng fish are attracted to the worm-like tentacle, thinking it might make a tasty meal, and snap! They are chomped up by the anglerfish’s jaws, which look just like a mouth full of knives!

Have you ever seen those little grey pillbugs that you can find in the garden? They look like tiny grey tanks, and roll up into an armoured ball if they are threatened. Well at the bottom of the ocean, you can find an animal that looks just like one of those pillbugs – only it’s over a foot long!

But one of the most fearsome creatures in the ocean is the famous giant squid. For many years, people thought the giant squid was just a legend. Then whale watchers started to notice marks on the sides of some whales, like they’d been caught by a suction cup that was the size of a dinner plate! Finally, the bodies of some squid washed up on the shores of Newfoundland, and the squid went from science fiction to science fact! They can grow up to 13 metres long, and are wicked predators, snaring prey with the serrated suction cups on their tentacles and devouring them with their sharp beaks.

Even though we think we’ve explored the planet, we’ve really just scratched the surface. There’s a whole world left to explore under the sea!

Post by Sarah

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

Some people think of mummies as scary monsters, but kids science knows better. A mummy is actually any body that has been dried out; this can happen in ice, in acid bogs, and in the desert. By using science to study these ancient bodies, we can learn the stories of people who lived thousands of years ago!

One day in late spring in the Italian Alps, a man and some of his friends got into a fight and the man was shot with an arrow. He was quickly covered by snow and ice, where he remained frozen for 5,300 years! Because he had been frozen so quickly, his body was preserved until the ice thawed, and this ice mummy (nicknamed Ötzi) became famous around the world.

Ötzi’s body tells the story of last days. His skeleton shows that he walked all over hills and mountains, and was probably a shepherd. He was also a very important man – the kind of axe he carried was only owned by powerful families. Scientists even managed to look inside his stomach to discover that his last meal was bread, deer meat, roots, and berries – yum!

Over two thousand years later, and half a world away, a fourteen year old boy named Nakht lived with his family in Egypt. His family were poor weavers, but after Nakht died, they used their savings to buy a beautiful coffin for him that they placed in a temple in the desert.

The ancient Egyptians were experts at preserving their dead. To mummify a body, they would remove all the organs (all those wet squishy things go bad quickly and smell bad) and cover the body with a salty substance called natron that would dry it out. Forty days later, they wrapped the body in bandages and placed it in a tomb. The body looked nice, but all the things that would tell future scientists about how these people lived were destroyed.

Fortunately for us, Nakht’s family was too poor to have him mummified. Instead, he was placed in the desert, which was so hot that it dried out his body and perfectly preserved him for 3,200 years. When he was rediscovered, scientists were able to learn many incredible things about him.

Nakht had a very hard life – he had lines on his bones that somebody gets when they are sick a lot as a kid and don’t grow. We do know that he got beef and pork to eat, because his body was full of parasites you can only get when these meats aren’t cooked properly.

Nakht’s coffin tells us that he was an expert weaver, and would probably have started work when he was seven, but his lungs tell us another story; that he might also have been a bit of a troublemaker! His lungs were full of red granite dust, which isn’t found anywhere near the town where he lived. Scientists believe that the only way this dust could have gotten there is if he’d gotten in trouble with the law, and been sentenced to polish granite statues in the temple as punishment!

But whatever he did, we know his family loved him, because they bought him the beautiful coffin that preserved him so well and gave us this amazing look at what life was like for an ordinary boy who lived over three thousand years ago.

Maybe someday, thousands of years from now, scientists might want to know how you lived, too!

Post by Sarah