My Science School

It was a fabulous bird or Egyptian myth. It lived for 500 years, built a nest of spices and burned itself to ashes. From the ashes came a young bird that lived for the next 500 years.

The Egyptians associated the phoenix with immortality, and that symbolism had a widespread appeal in late antiquity. The phoenix was compared to undying Rome, and it appears on the coinage of the late Roman Empire as a symbol of the Eternal City. It was also widely interpreted as an allegory of resurrection and life after death—ideas that also appealed to emergent Christianity.

In Islamic mythology the phoenix was identified with the ?anq?? (Persian: s?morgh), a huge mysterious bird (probably a heron) that was originally created by God with all perfections but thereafter became a plague and was killed.

Credit : Britannica

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In Greek mythology pegasus was a fabulous winged horse, which sprang from the blood of Medusa, after Perseus had cut off her head. Pegasus flew to heaven and a constellation is named after him.

With Athena’s (or Poseidon’s) help, another Greek hero, Bellerophon, captured Pegasus and rode him first in his fight with the Chimera and later while he was taking vengeance on Stheneboea (Anteia), who had falsely accused Bellerophon. Subsequently Bellerophon attempted to fly with Pegasus to heaven but was unseated and killed or, by some accounts, lamed. The winged horse became a constellation and the servant of Zeus. The spring Hippocrene on Mount Helicon was believed to have been created when the hoof of Pegasus struck a rock.

Pegasus’s story was a favourite theme in Greek art and literature; Euripides’ lost tragedy Bellerophon was parodied at the beginning of Aristophanes’ Peace (421 BC). In late antiquity Pegasus’s soaring flight was interpreted as an allegory of the soul’s immortality; in modern times it has been regarded as a symbol of poetic inspiration.

Credit : Britannica 

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Pandas live in isolated parts of China, high up in the mountains. They are very rare, and live alone in areas of bamboo forest.

They must eat around 26 to 84 pounds of it every day, depending on what part of the bamboo they are eating. They use their enlarged wrist bones that function as opposable thumbs.

A newborn panda is about the size of a stick of butter—about 1/900th the size of its mother—but females can grow up to about 200 pounds, while males can grow up to about 300 pounds as adults. These bears are excellent tree climbers despite their bulk.

The biological diversity of the panda’s habitat is unparalleled in the temperate world and rivals that of tropical ecosystems, making the giant panda an excellent example of an umbrella species conferring protection on many other species where pandas live. In other words, when we protect pandas, we invariably protect other animals that live around them, such as multicolored pheasants, the golden monkey, takin, and crested ibis. Pandas also bring sustainable economic benefits to many local communities through ecotourism.

Credit : WWF

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No it is the same colour as the black rhino! It has a wide upper lip and grazes like a cow. The black rhino's lip is pointed for plucking twigs and leaves.

White rhinos live on Africa's grassy plains, where they sometimes gather in groups of as many as a dozen individuals. Females reproduce only every two and a half to five years. Their single calf does not live on its own until it is about three years old.

Under the hot African sun, white rhinos take cover by lying in the shade. Rhinos are also wallowers. They find a suitable water hole and roll in its mud, coating their skin with a natural bug repellent and sunblock.

Rhinos have sharp hearing and a keen sense of smell. They may find one another by following the trail of scent each enormous animal leaves behind it on the landscape.

White rhinos have two horns, the foremost more prominent than the other. Rhino horns grow as much as three inches a year, and have been known to grow up to five feet long. Females use their horns to protect their young, while males use them to battle attackers.

The prominent horn for which rhinos are so well known has been their downfall. Many animals have been killed for this hard, hair-like growth, which is revered for medicinal use in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The horn is also valued in North Africa and the Middle East as an ornamental dagger handle.

Credit : National Geographic 

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This fierce animal used to live in Australia, but is now only found in Tasmania. About lm (40in) long from nose to tail, it only comes out at night. It feeds on small animals, birds, lizards and even wallabies if it can catch them.

The Tasmanian devil is the world's largest carnivorous marsupial, reaching 30 inches in length and weighing up to 26 pounds, although its size will vary widely depending on where it lives and the availability of food. Its oversize head houses sharp teeth and strong, muscular jaws that can deliver, pound for pound, one of the most powerful bites of any mammal.

Once abundant throughout Australia, Tasmanian devils are now found only on the island state of Tasmania. Their Tasmanian range encompasses the entire island, although they are partial to coastal scrublands and forests. Biologists speculate that their extinction on the mainland about 400 years ago may be linked to the introduction of Asian dogs—or dingoes.

Tasmanian devils are strictly carnivorous, surviving on small prey such as frogs, birds, fish, and insects. They prefer scavanging to hunting and frequently feast communally on carrion. They are at their most rowdy when jockeying for position on a large carcass. Like other marsupials, when they are well-fed, their tails swell with stored fat.

Devils are solitary and nocturnal, spending their days alone in hollow logs, caves, or burrows, and emerging at night to feed. They use their long whiskers and excellent sense of smell and sight to avoid predators and locate prey and carrion. They'll eat pretty much anything they can get their teeth on, and when they do find food, they are voracious, consuming everything—including hair, organs, and bones.

Credit : National Geographic 

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The tuatara is a reptile found only in parts of New Zealand. It belongs to the stegosaurus family and has remained unchanged for over 200 million years. It is our only living contact with the dinosaurs.

The stegosaurus hunts at night, but don't worry-it's only about 75cm (30in) long!

Adult tuataras are active at night because that’s when their food is most available, although they do come out of their burrow to bask in the sun. They eat mostly insects, especially beetles, but have been known to eat lizards, birds, and bird eggs. Young tuataras usually hunt for food during the day to keep from being eaten by adult tuataras at night! 

There are two rows of teeth on the upper jaw and one row on the lower jaw that fits between the upper rows of teeth when the mouth is closed. The arrangement of the teeth helps tuataras tear apart hard insects. These small teeth are not replaced when lost or broken, and older tuataras have to eat softer food items as their teeth wear down. 

Credit : San Diego Zoo

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It sounds like a galleon but it is really a very dangerous type of jellyfish! Its poisonous stinging tentacles up to 25 m (82ft) long can sometimes kill humans.

The man-of-war comprises four separate polyps. It gets its name from the uppermost polyp, a gas-filled bladder, or pneumatophore, which sits above the water and somewhat resembles an old warship at full sail. Man-of-wars are also known as bluebottles for the purple-blue color of their pneumatophores.

The tentacles are the man-of-war's second organism. These long, thin tendrils can extend 165 feet in length below the surface, although 30 feet is more the average. They are covered in venom-filled nematocysts used to paralyze and kill fish and other small creatures. For humans, a man-of-war sting is excruciatingly painful, but rarely deadly. But beware—even dead man-of-wars washed up on shore can deliver a sting.

Muscles in the tentacles draw prey up to a polyp containing the gastrozooids or digestive organisms. A fourth polyp contains the reproductive organisms.

Credit : National Geographic 

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Molluscs are a major group of animals that include shellfish, snails and slugs. They have soft, limbless bodies with no skeleton-most of them are protected by a hard shell. Squids, octopuses and cuttlefish have internal skeletons.

Most molluscs live in the sea, but some live in fresh water or on land. They are cold blooded.

The mollusks have adapted to all habitats except air. Although basically marine, bivalves and gastropods include freshwater species. Gastropods have also adapted to land, with thousands of species living a fully terrestrial existence. Found on rocky, sandy, and muddy substrata, mollusks burrow, crawl, become cemented to the surface, or are free-swimming.

Mollusks are found worldwide, but there is a preponderance of some groups in certain areas of the world. The close association of many molluscan groups with their food source—whether by direct dependence on a specific food supply (e.g., plant-eating, or herbivores) or by involvement in food chains—limits their geographic distribution; for example, bivalves of the family Teredinidae (shipworms) are associated with wood. In general, cold-water regions support fewer species.

Credit : Britannica 

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You are hearing ordinary sounds echoing and re-echoing as the air inside the shell vibrates. Another roaring sound is the amplified sound of the blood rushing through your own ear!

As lovely as that concept might be, though, it's only a metaphor: When you listen to a shell, you're not really hearing the sound of the ocean. The shape of seashells just happens to make them great amplifiers of ambient noise.

Any air that makes its way into a shell's cavity gets bounced around by its hard, curved inner surfaces. The resonating air produces sound.

The pitch of the sound depends on the size of the shell. Air takes longer to bounce back and forth in a bigger shell than it does in a smaller one, so you'll perceive the pitch of sound emerging from a bigger shell as being lower than that from a smaller one. Whether high or low in pitch, almost all shells sound pleasantly ocean-like.

Credit : Live Science 

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Hermit crabs use abandoned molluse shells as homes. This crab's abdomen is soft, so the extra shell is for protection. When the crab grows it simply finds a bigger shell to live in.

Hermit crabs vary in their mating habits. The Caribbean hermit crab, for example, lives in wetlands, but when it’s time to mate, will head for the seashore in huge masses.

Amid the chaos, males and females find each other, coming partly out of their shells so the male can transfer a sperm packet to the female, which fertilizes her eggs. She later carries her eggs to the water’s edge, where contact with seawater causes the eggs to burst and the larvae to float away.

Hermit crabs don’t breed well in captivity, and so the numerous land hermit crabs seen in pet stores and tourist shops are taken from the wild, which is considered an unsustainable practice.

Plastic pollution is also a problem for hermit crabs, which often mistake a plastic bottle cap or container for a new home. A 2020 study in the Journal of Hazardous Materials found that around 570,000 hermit crabs die annually from getting caught in plastic debris on two tropical islands in the South Pacific.

When these trapped crabs die, they release a pheromone signal to other crabs that there may be a shell available, which lures even more crabs into a death trap.

Credit : National Geographic 

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The puffer fish, which puffs itself up when threatened, is one of the world's most poisonous fish. They are eaten in Japan, after careful preparation by a trained chef, who removes the poisonous sac.

This delicacy is known as a fugu and is eaten raw. Many people die each year from eating this dish. The poison paralyses the nervous system and there is no known antidote.

A predator that manages to snag a puffer before it inflates won’t feel lucky for long. Almost all pufferfish contain tetrodotoxin, a substance that makes them foul tasting and often lethal to fish. To humans, tetrodotoxin is deadly, up to 1,200 times more poisonous than cyanide. There is enough toxin in one pufferfish to kill 30 adult humans, and there is no known antidote.

There are more than 120 species of pufferfish worldwide. Most are found in tropical and subtropical ocean waters, but some species live in brackish and even fresh water. They have long, tapered bodies with bulbous heads. Some wear wild markings and colors to advertise their toxicity, while others have more muted or cryptic coloring to blend in with their environment.

They range in size from the 1-inch-long dwarf or pygmy puffer to the freshwater giant puffer, which can grow to more than 2 feet in length. They are scaleless fish and usually have rough to spiky skin. All have four teeth that are fused together into a beak-like form.

Credit : National Geographic 

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This fish cannot fly like a bird, but it leaps into the air, up to 6m (20ft) then glides for about 400m (1,300ft) before splashing back.

There are roughly 40 species of flying fish. Flying fish are tropical and temperate marine species that can be seen off both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States. They are also found in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. Open oceans provide a habitat for most flying fish, but some live instead on the outskirts of coral reefs.

It’s thought that flying fish evolved a flying mechanism to escape from their many oceanic predators. Once in the air, though, they sometimes become food for birds. Young flying fish may have filaments protruding from their lower jaws that camouflage them as plant blossoms.

Spawning takes place in the open ocean, near the water’s surface. A female deposits eggs, which are attached by sticky filaments to seaweed and floating debris. Newly hatched flying fish have whiskers near their mouths, which disguises them as plants, thus protecting them from predators. A flying fish lives for an average of five years.

Credit : The National Wildlife Federation

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The millipede, like the centipede, is not an insect, nor does it have a thousand feet. It has a worm-like segmented body with up to 240 legs.

Young millipedes have only six legs but extra legs grow as they mature.

Millipedes are found in every U.S. state, including Alaska and Hawaii, as well as in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Moist soil beneath decaying leaf litter or mulch is a millipede's prime habitat. Millipedes lack stingers or pinchers to fend off predators like birds, toads, and small mammals. Instead they rely on their hard exoskeleton as a first line of defense. Some species can even produce hydrogen cyanide, a noxious liquid that is toxic to small animals. Millipedes sometimes find their way into basements, but they’re mostly harmless to homes and people.

Millipedes lay their eggs in the soil each spring. When the offspring hatch, they have only a few pairs of legs. After each molt, they gain new segments and legs until they reach adulthood. After molting, millipedes consume their exoskeletons to gain back valuable nutrients.

Millipede lifespans vary widely among species. Non-native giant African millipedes are often kept as pets and can live upward of seven years.

Credit : The National Wildlife Federation 

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Centipedes' bodies are made up of many segments, each with one pair of legs. Although the word 'centipede' means 100 feet, some of these meat-eating creatures can have as little as 15 pairs of legs, or as many as 177 pairs.

Soil centipedes (order Geophilomorpha) are burrowers that dig by alternately expanding and contracting the body, in the manner of earthworms. The order Scolopendrida, or Scolopendromorpha, of the tropics contains the largest centipedes, with Scolopendra gigantea of the American tropics reaching a length of 280 mm (11 inches). These forms are capable of inflicting severe bites. Scolopendrids, as well as the geophilids, have relatively slow and sinuous movements.

The little stone centipedes (order Lithobiomorpha) are short-bodied. They, like the house centipedes, run with the body held straight and are the fastest moving centipedes.

There are nearly 3,000 known species. Centipedes are often grouped with the millipedes (class Diplopoda) and some other minor groups into the superclass Myriopoda.

Credit :  Britannica 

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This small saltwater fish 4-30cm (1.5 12in) long looks like a tiny hobby horse. It has a prehensile tail (it can grasp things) and it swims upright.

A seahorse tank should be at least 18 inches tall. Seahorses prefer to move up and down in an aquarium more than side to side. If you are going to keep more than one small seahorse or one of the larger seahorse species, you will want a larger tank.

Because they are not strong swimmers (and because their gills are not very efficient), seahorses do not like strong water movement.1? Seahorses have a short and very primitive digestion tract, which allows a great deal of undigested food to end up on the bottom of the tank, adding to water quality issues.

Seahorses need at least one hold fast or hitching post in the tank, so they don't have to be constantly swimming. If they aren't looking for food, seahorses will spend most of their time with their tails wrapped around almost anything that will hold them in place. Gorgonians work great for hitching posts, as do faux corals or even plastic aquarium plants.

Credit : The spruce pets 

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