Life in the deserts
Cards (14)
- Addax
- Widely spread hooves and feet, adapted to walking on soft sand
- Highly reflective coat
- Ability to extract all the water it needs from plants
- Fennec
- Fox-like animal
- Lives in the Sahara Desert
- Hunts at night
- Large ears
- Small size
- Thick, long, whitish to sand coloured fur with a black-tipped tail
- Fat sand rat
- Remarkably efficient kidneys
- Obtains water from the leaves of the salt bush
- Saguaro
- Slow-growing, large cactus
- Spongy inner layer that helps it to evenly distribute the moisture
- Shallow and wide-ranging roots, through which it can collect moisture from a large area
- Prickly pear cactus
- Stores water in its spongy tissues
- Thorns keep these plants safe from many animal predators
- Fishhook cactus
- Hook-shaped spines help divert heat and provide shade to the growing tip of the plant
- Barrel cactus
- Stores water
- Weight increases so much that a large specimen can weigh up to several hundred pounds
- Old man cactus
- Wisps of whitish hair along its stem provide shade and prevent water loss
- Many ancient rock paintings in African and Asian deserts show giraffes, antelopes, and other grazing animals, that could not have survived in the present desert conditions. This suggests that those areas were once fertile.
- Desert people
- Tuaregs
- Bedouins
- San people
- Tuaregs
- Nomadic people of the Sahara Desert
- Live in the northern reaches of Mali, near Timbuktu and Kidal
- Called 'blue men of the desert' because of their blue-coloured veils
- Bedouins
- Nomadic tribes from the Arabian Peninsula, mainly Saudi Arabia
- Excellent trackers
- San people
- People of the Kalahari Desert
- Survive by hunting and gathering edible plants and insects
- Rarely drink water and get most of the water they need from plant roots and desert melons
- In the desert, sound travels a long way because there is little other noise. Animals that hunt here usually have very large ears. This helps them to trap sound waves and track down food easily.