Habitats around the world
Biology · Key Stage 2 · The School
Different places, different conditions
A HABITAT is the natural home of a plant or animal. Habitats around the world are very different from each other. Some are hot. Some are cold. Some are wet. Some are dry. Each set of conditions suits different living things. No single habitat suits every living thing. Travelling the whole world would show you an enormous range of habitats.
Hot and cold habitats
A DESERT is hot in the day. It often gets very little rain. The ARCTIC is bitterly cold. It has ice and snow for most of the year. Animals in each place have features that help them cope. Those features would not help at all in the other place.
Wet habitats
A RAINFOREST is warm and very wet. It rains a lot there, all year. An OCEAN habitat sits entirely underwater. Some parts of it are very deep and dark. Both places are wet. But they are wet in very different ways. And they suit very different living things. A fish could not survive for long in a rainforest, wet as it is.
A polar bear has thick white fur. It also has a layer of fat under its skin. Both are built for the freezing Arctic. Now move that same bear to a hot, wet rainforest. The thick fur becomes a real problem. The bear would get too hot, very quickly. Its white fur helped it hide on snow. Against green leaves, that same fur would stand out sharply instead. The very features that helped it survive in one place would work against it in the other.