Appreciate that living organisms compete with each other to gain advantage for survival.
flow and recycle
adventures in space and timelife depends on life
what is life?
Frogs are common and fascinating. Pupils can be encouraged to find and observe (but not collect!) spawn in their local ponds. Here we develop the idea of frogs having adventures, an idea introduced in an earlier story, Squirrel Wars.
“Their lives are adventures.
The word ‘adventure’ has two parts:
Ad means moving towards something.
Venture means attempting something dangerous or difficult, that is risky, with no guarantee of success.
Put the two together and you get the idea that the lives of all living organisms are risky journeys into the future, with no guarantee of success or survival.”
This story adds the idea of competition, between rival males for the opportunity to breed and between tadpoles, which eat each other for food. Competition is defined as “trying to gain an advantage by being better”.
By competing in this way, natural selection is enabling the strongest, fastest growing and healthiest frogs to mature and be able to breed in future years. In doing so, they will pass their genetic offspring onto future generations. This is the basis for evolution and has ensured the survival of frogs for the last 275 million years ago.
Having uncertain adventures, in a competing environment is the beating heart of evolution.
