Jungle Animals

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Jungle Animals
A Science Perspective
By Helen Merrill
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• Life in the jungle is filled with danger. Cougars
  and pumas stand ready to pounce snakes sliver
  unseen between feet to administer a lethal bite
  while exotic birds chirp overhead. An animal must
  be both smart and strong to survive in this
  environment. The intense competition from other
  species makes jungle animals the most
  interesting. The jungles of the world are being
  destroyed by loggers and development. Many
  species found in the rainforest are endangered.
  Once they disappear, they are gone forever!

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Animal Classification
Jungle animals can be classified into these
different groups
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Mammals

• Mammals are vertebrate animals with body hair,
  mammary glands and four limbs. They breathe air
  and are warm-blooded. They have a four-chambered
  heart. The young are born alive and feed on their
  mothers milk. The largest animals, the elephant
  and the whale, are mammals,.

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Birds

• Birds are warm-blooded, air-breathing vertebrates
  with a four chambered heart that are covered with
  feathers. They reproduce by laying eggs. They
  have a light body weight in relation to their
  size.

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Amphibians

• Amphibians are the earliest form of all land
  vertebrates. The word amphibia means both
  lives. These animals begin life in the water,
  spend their adult life on land, and return to the
  water to lay their eggs. They are born with gills
  to breathe under water. These are replaced by
  lungs at the end of their development, or
  metamorphosis, into adults, They lay eggs.

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Reptiles

• Reptiles are cold-blooded and breathe air. Their
  skin is thick, usually forming scales or plates.
  Their young develop in eggs, inside or outside
  the body, depending on the species.

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Fish

• Fish live in water all their lives. They breathe
  oxygen from water through special organs called
  gills. They have fins and scales. Fish are
  cold-blooded and give birth to babies hatched
  from eggs.

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Insects and Spiders

• Insects and spiders are known as arthropods.
  They have segmented bodies, jointed legs, and an
  external skeleton. There are more than a million
  species of insects and around 50,000 species of
  spiders, scorpions, mites and ticks. They are
  cold-blooded and give birth to young hatched from
  eggs.

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Habitat

• A habitat is an environment where the existing
  conditions meet the needs of a form of wildlife
  for survival. The setting is determined by the
  geology of the land and the climate. These
  factors influence the vegetation, which in turn
  defines the animal inhabitants.

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Resources

• Wildlife Fact File, 1995
• http//junglewalk.com/
• http//mbgnet.mobot.org/sets/rforest/animals/
• http//www.junglephotos.com/