50 Fun Facts About Biomes

Which continent is classed as the largest desert on Earth?

Antarctica is a polar desert because so little snow falls there, and at about 14 million square km it is far bigger than the Sahara.

Camels keep going when desert food is scarce by drawing on which substance stored in their humps?

Fat fills a camel's hump, not water, and a camel that burns through its reserve is left with a hump that goes limp and droops.

Which ocean habitat covers less than 0.1% of the sea yet shelters at least a quarter of all marine species?

Coral reefs occupy an area only about half the size of France, and the largest barrier reef of all is Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

Which conifer-forest biome, ringing the far north through Canada and Russia, is the largest on land?

Taiga is also known as boreal forest or snow forest, and its freezing winters last five to seven months of the year.

Which desert, the driest non-polar place on Earth, is used to test instruments for Mars missions?

The Atacama averages about 15 mm of rain a year, and some of its weather stations have never recorded any at all.

Which rainforest layer, a roof of treetops 30 to 45 metres up, shelters animals that never touch the ground?

Canopy branches are so crowded with life that, by some estimates, half of all plant species on Earth grow there.

Which layer of frozen ground beneath the Arctic surface releases carbon dioxide and methane into the air as it thaws?

Permafrost lies under about 15% of the Northern Hemisphere's exposed land and stores roughly twice as much carbon as the atmosphere holds.

Which rainforest, the largest on Earth, is shared by nine nations and holds an estimated 390 billion trees?

The Amazon makes up over half of the planet's remaining rainforest, and about 60% of it lies inside Brazil.

Which biome of open grassland dotted with widely spaced trees includes the Serengeti plains of East Africa?

Savanna covers about 20% of Earth's land, and its trees stand far enough apart that sunlight reaches an unbroken carpet of grass below.

Which cold biome, where a short growing season keeps trees out, is carpeted with mosses, sedges and dwarf shrubs?

Tundra turns soggy in summer: only the top layer of soil thaws, so meltwater cannot drain away and pools into countless lakes and marshes.

Which word describes temperate-forest trees such as oak, maple and beech that drop their leaves every autumn?

Deciduous trees grow in the tropics too, but there it is the dry season rather than winter cold that strips their branches bare.

Which coastal habitat, such as Chesapeake Bay, forms where a river's fresh water mixes with the salty sea?

Estuary waters are nurseries for the young of many sea fish and shellfish, and 22 of the world's 32 largest cities stood beside one in the early 1990s.

Which salt-tolerant trees form the Sundarbans, the tiger-haunted tidal forest shared by India and Bangladesh?

Mangroves filter out salt and breathe through aerial roots, and the Sundarbans is the largest forest of them in the world.

What are plants such as orchids and bromeliads called when they perch on tree branches instead of rooting in soil?

Epiphytes take nothing from their host but a perch, drinking rain, fog and dew instead, and a single rainforest tree can carry several tonnes of them.

Besides temperature, which climate measurement best predicts whether land becomes forest, grassland or desert?

Precipitation and temperature are the two axes of the classic chart ecologists use to sort biomes, with desert at the dry end and rainforest at the wet.

Which imaginary line do the world's tropical rainforests cluster around, mostly within 10 degrees north or south?

Equator warmth and year-round rain feed forests that are home to about half of all the plant and animal species on the planet.

Which weather pattern leaves the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada dry on the downwind side of the Sierra Nevada?

Rain shadow deserts form because air climbing a mountain range drops its moisture on the way up, then warms and dries out as it sinks down the far side.

Which fungus-and-alga partnerships, wrongly called reindeer moss, do caribou dig through snow to eat in winter?

Lichens are low in protein but high in carbohydrates, a winter staple that spares reindeer from burning through their stored body reserves.

Which grazer of North America's prairies was hunted from tens of millions down to about a thousand animals by 1889?

Bison still shape the grasslands they graze: the dusty hollows they wallow in boost the variety of prairie plants and animals.

Which rainforest mammal of Central and South America grows green algae in its fur as camouflage?

Sloth fur is a tiny world of its own: the algae feed moths that live nowhere else, and the animal climbs down to the ground only about once a week.

Which word names the grassland belt that stretches some 8,000 km from Hungary to Manchuria?

Steppe grassland gave riders an open road across Eurasia, and it played a major part in spreading the horse, the wheel and Indo-European languages.

Which fertile grassland covering Uruguay and the plains around Buenos Aires is the homeland of the gaucho horsemen?

Pampas grassland spreads over more than 1.2 million square km, taking in the southern tip of Brazil as well as Uruguay and central Argentina.

Which drought-hardy shrubland of coastal California is shaped by hot dry summers and mild wet winters?

Chaparral shrubs such as manzanita and chamise are built for drought, with small, thick, leathery leaves that stay on the plant all year.

Which giant cactus of the Sonoran Desert often lives past 150 years and may not grow its first arm until 75?

Saguaro seedlings are painfully slow starters, standing only about 6 mm tall after two years, and some plants never grow any arms at all.

Which coastal African desert, perhaps the oldest on Earth, has beetles that drink fog condensing on their own backs?

Namib wildlife runs on fog, which can blanket the coast more than 180 days a year and also waters the strange welwitschia plant found nowhere else.

Which cold Asian desert, where frost and snow can dust the dunes, gave up a famous clutch of dinosaur eggs?

The Gobi gave fossil hunters the first dinosaur eggs recognised by science in 1923, and it spans southern Mongolia and northern China.

Which desert rodent of the American Southwest gets all the water it needs from the seeds it eats?

Kangaroo rat kidneys save every drop by making very concentrated urine, so the Merriam's species does not need to drink water at all.

Which fox of the Sahara, the smallest fox species of all, sheds heat through its unusually large ears?

Fennec fox ears do double duty: besides dumping heat, they pick up the sounds of prey moving under the sand.

Which summer counterpart of hibernation lets African lungfish and land snails sleep through spells of heat and drought?

Estivation is also spelled aestivation, from the Latin for summer, and snails often climb plants and fence posts to wait out the heat.

Which fast-growing seaweed forms towering underwater forests along cool coasts, adding up to 60 cm in one day?

Giant kelp forests are guarded by sea otters, which prey on the sea urchins that can chew through the seaweed's anchoring holdfasts.

Which microscopic drifters of the sunlit ocean produce about half of the oxygen made on Earth?

Phytoplankton manage it with only about 1% of the world's plant biomass, yet they carry out roughly half of all photosynthesis on the planet.

Which deep-sea features, first seen up close in 1977 near the Galápagos, feed giant tube worms without any sunlight?

Hydrothermal vents support a food chain built on bacteria that make food from toxic hydrogen sulfide, and over 300 new species have turned up around them.

Which strip of seashore lies underwater at high tide and bare at low tide, home to barnacles, mussels and starfish?

Intertidal zone rocks hold tide pools too, hollows that fill as the water rises and keep sea creatures wet until it comes back.

Which acidic wetland, built up from layers of dead sphagnum moss, has preserved human bodies for thousands of years?

Peat bog water is so acidic and airless that Denmark's Tollund Man, found in 1950, was first taken for a recent murder victim.

Which Florida wetland, nicknamed the River of Grass, is really a shallow river about 60 miles wide?

Everglades water drains south from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay in a sheet more than 100 miles long, moving so gently it is known as sheetflow.

Which South American floodplain, the world's largest tropical wetland, is about 80% underwater in the rainy season?

Pantanal floods shelter one of the largest and healthiest jaguar populations on Earth, and the wetland spills from Brazil into Bolivia and Paraguay.

Which term covers the non-living parts of a biome, such as sunlight, temperature, soil and water?

Abiotic factors go well beyond the weather: tides, salinity, altitude and the acidity of the water all help decide what can live in a place.

Which term names the transition area where two biomes meet and blend, such as a forest edge grading into grassland?

Ecotone borders often hold a greater variety of plants and animals than either neighbour, a boost that ecologists call the edge effect.

Which antelope, more than a million strong, makes up most of the great yearly migration around the Serengeti?

Wildebeest time the loop to follow the rains, and each February the herds drop about 500,000 calves in just two to three weeks.

Which American ecologist, who first proposed the five kingdoms of life, also drew the classic climate chart of biomes?

Robert Whittaker, a Kansas-born Cornell professor, named his five kingdoms in 1969: animals, plants, fungi, protists and monerans.

Which word did English botanist Arthur Tansley introduce to science for a living community plus its climate and soil?

Ecosystem was not Tansley's own invention: he asked Arthur Roy Clapham to come up with a word, then published it in 1935.

Which naturalist climbed Ecuador's Chimborazo and drew a famous cross-section of the plant life at each altitude?

Humboldt reached 5,878 m on the volcano, and the chart he called a Naturgemälde, about two feet by three, was packed with plant geography.

Which conifer of Siberia's northern forests breaks the evergreen rule by dropping all its needles each autumn?

Larch grows farther north than any other tree, reaching the edge of the tundra in both Siberia and North America.

Which shrubland of South Africa's Cape, famed for its proteas, holds some 6,000 plant species found nowhere else?

Fynbos fills only a coastal belt 100 to 200 km wide, yet it anchors the Cape Floral Kingdom, one of just six floral kingdoms in the world.

Which sealed glass complex in Arizona locked in a crew of eight for two years among its own rainforest and ocean?

Biosphere 2 ran into trouble on that 1991 to 1993 mission: oxygen and food ran low, and many of the animals and plants sealed inside died off.

Which Cornwall attraction, built in a worked-out clay pit, grows a rainforest inside giant domes called biomes?

Eden Project domes are made of inflated plastic cells on a steel frame, and the bigger one holds one of the largest indoor rainforests in the world.

Which process is Africa's Great Green Wall, a band of trees planned from Senegal to Djibouti, meant to hold back?

Desertification is the slow turning of fertile land into arid waste, driven by drought, overgrazing and the cutting of trees for fuel.

On a mountainside, what name is given to the height above which it is too cold for forests to grow?

Tree line growth is sparse and stunted, and wind and cold twist the last survivors into a tangle known as krummholz, German for crooked wood.

Which natural event do jack pines wait years for before the resin-sealed cones in their branches will open?

Wildfire heat melts the resin that glues the cones shut, so the seeds rain down and reseed the burnt ground even as the parent trees die.

Which 1930s disaster struck the Great Plains after deep plowing tore up the native grasses that anchored the soil?

Dust Bowl was a name coined by an Associated Press editor in 1935, after the Black Sunday storms turned loose topsoil into black blizzards.