What do animals need to survive?

How do animals survive?

Animals come in all shapes and sizes and they live in all sorts of different places.

But they all need the same four important things to survive:

• Food
• Water
• Air
• Shelter

What animals need to survive

Food

Animals all have different diets, but we can group them in three ways:

• Carnivores which eat meat
• Herbivores which eat plants
• Omnivores which both eat meat and plants.

Animals can also be grouped as either predators that eat other animals or prey that are eaten by other animals.

Water

All animals need water to survive. Land animals will get water by drinking it.

Fish and other aquatic animals absorb it through their skin.

Air

Animals need oxygen to breathe.

Mammals have lungs which they use to breathe oxygen in and carbon dioxide out.

Fish are different, they have gills which absorb oxygen from the water.

Shelter

Animals need shelter for protection.

It protects them from predators and other threats like the weather, which in some habitats can be extremely hot or cold.

Watch: How animals survive.

Super survival facts

• Octopuses and cuttlefish can both change their colour in order to be able to hide in their environment.

• Emperor penguins huddle together in big groups to keep warm and survive in the freezing Antarctic temperatures.

• Dolphins can use sound to find food with echolocation.

• Some animals can be both predators and prey, like a spider which eats flies and other insects but is also eaten by birds.

• The oystercatcher is a bird that has a hooked beak so it can dig into the sand to find food and survive.

• Pufferfish can blow up to almost double their size to scare off predators.

• Some animals, like bears, hibernate by going to sleep during the winter months when it is cold and food is hard to find.

• Seagulls have special glands that allow them to drink small amounts of seawater.

What do animals need to survive?

Have a look at these animals and learn about what they need.

Did you know?

Camels can survive for up to fifteen days without water in the desert.

Rather than having fat spread all over their bodies which would mean they would get very hot, camels store fat in humps on their backs. They use these humps as a source of energy to survive when food and water are scarce.

Dromedary camels which originated in Arabia have one hump while Bactrian camels from central Asia have two. As the camels use the fat, their humps will become floppy and flabby.

Important words

Air – Animals need air to breathe and to take in oxygen.

Carnivore – An animal that eats meat. Cats and dogs are carnivores.

Echolocation – Some animals, such as dolphins and bats, are able to locate objects by making sounds and listening for the echo as the sound bounces back off the objects.

the process by which animals such as bats locate objects by emitting sounds and hearing them echoed.

Food – The things an animal or plant eats and gets nutrition from.

Gills – Gills are the organs that a fish uses to take oxygen from the water.

Herbivore – An animal that eat plants.

Hibernate – Some animals can sleep through the winter in a den or burrow to save energy. Bears, snakes, squirrels and bats are all types of animals that hibernate.

Lungs – Lungs are an organ that mammals have which they used to breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.

Omnivore – An animal that eats both meat and plants. A rat is an example of an omnivore.

Predator – An animal that hunts and eats other animals. A lion is an example of a predator.

Prey – An animal that is hunted and eaten by other animals. Zebras are prey for lions.

Shelter – Where an animal finds protection from predators.

Survive – When a plant or animal continues to live.

Water – All animals need to drink or to take in water to survive.

Activities

Activity 1 – How animals survive quiz

Activity 2 – What do animals need to survive word quiz