Animals and plants have different characteristics. Let’s discover five brilliant biodiversity facts for kids.
Habitats are made up of many different organisms, some which are even too small for the naked eye to see, like germs. Each habitat has a diverse range of animals, insects, and organisms which live there. Biodiversity in an area allows for the development of an effective food chain with producers, predators, and prey.
These are:
Species diversity – this is a description of how many of a type of animal live in a community, this community can consist of a single habitat or ecosystem but can also describe the diversity of the species across the entire planet.
Ecosystem diversity – this describes how many ecosystems are present in a geographical location. Some places around the world are known for a type of ecosystem such as Rainforests in Brazil and Deserts in Egypt.
And, Genetic diversity – this is the description of how many genetic traits a species have, like the many breeds of dog there are.
Biodiversity is very important to the food we eat everyday and that is because of the biodiversity of plant life and how it forms different foods. Humans only eat around 200 species of plant that are available in the world but we get many different foods from single plants which offers us more variety.
Did you know that one species of plant called the Brassicaceae family creates broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kale, and mustard. That’s a lot of different vegetables from just one species of plant.
Some groups of animals have a very large species diversity meaning that the many animals in the species look very different. One example of this is fish, there are over 30,000 types of fish in the ocean and they can all look very different. For example a zebra turkey fish looks very different to a trout but they are the same species of animal.
The biodiversity of animals in a habitat dictates the food chain which is an important part of ecosystems, it is a chain of food for prey and predators which is how animals in that habitat eat and survive. Predators eat prey to stay alive, prey eat consumers of energy such as insects or producers of energy such as plants. Some prey are also the predators to smaller prey. This creates a delicate chain which works in harmony.
Without the biodiverse group of animals and organisms in a food chain working in harmony the food chain would collapse. If an animal was prey for a predator and it was no longer in the chain, the predator has lost that food source and has to find a new one or it will starve. If the animal was a predator the prey now have no one hunting them, this may sound like a good thing but it can unbalance the ecosystem as there is nothing keeping the population of prey in check. So there are far too many of that animal now eating the insects and plants in the area.
We hope you enjoyed learning more things about biodiversity as much as we loved teaching you about it. Now that you know how important the environment is to our planet Earth, you can move on to learn more about our environmental topics like: Ecosystems, Environmental Sustainability, Reptiles and Invertebrates.
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