Home Sweet Habitat: How Living Things Get What They Need

Imagine you have been dropped in the middle of a desert with no water, no food, and no shelter. How long do you think you would last? Now imagine a camel in that same desert. The camel would be perfectly fine! Why do you think that is? Think about what YOU need every day to stay alive — food, water, a safe place to sleep. Animals and plants need those things too. The place where a living thing finds everything it needs is called its habitat.

A habitat is the natural place where a living thing lives. It provides everything that creature needs to survive. There are four main things every living thing needs from its habitat: 1. FOOD — The habitat must have food available. A rabbit lives in a meadow because grasses and plants grow there. The meadow is the rabbit's food source. 2. WATER — All living things need water. A frog lives near a pond or stream because it needs water to drink, to keep its skin wet, and to lay its eggs. 3. SHELTER — Living things need a safe place to rest and hide from danger. A bird builds its nest in a tree — the tree is part of the bird's habitat providing shelter. 4. SPACE — Every living thing needs enough room to grow, move, find food, and raise its young. If a habitat cannot provide these four things, the living thing cannot survive there. A fish needs water to breathe through its gills — take away the water and the fish cannot live. A polar bear has thick fur and hunts seals under Arctic ice — put it in a rainforest and it would struggle to find the food and cold temperatures its body is built for. This is called depending on a habitat. 'Depend' means you need something and cannot do without it. Living things are matched to their habitats because their bodies and behaviours have adapted — changed over a very long time — to suit that particular place.