Question

A polar bear is better adapted to its surroundings than the animals animals of the tropical rainforest.

Answer 1

When the weather gets cold, you put on a coat to keep warm. If it’s hot, you wear a hat or fan yourself to cool down. Those are both ways of adapting to your habitat. While animals don’t have clothes, they do have built-in ways of keeping the right temperature and protecting themselves in the habitat they live in.

There are a number of ways that animals adapt – these can be inside our outside their bodies, in ways that they act, or even in ways that they work with other animals in their habitat. If you suddenly took an animal outside its habitat into something completely different, all those adaptations wouldn’t work anymore, and it wouldn’t be good for the animal. It’s the same as if you dressed in your warmest coat and woolly hat and scarf in the middle of August – you’d be much too hot!