Animals

You are an animal, and so is every animal from a sponge to a blue whale. Every animal is many cells working as one body. Every animal must eat other living or dead things to live. That sets animals apart from most plants, which make food from sunlight. On this tree, the group sitting beside animals is fungi.

The group holds three very different branches. Sponges are lumpy and full of tiny holes, with no head, tail or eyes. Each jellyfish, and each tiny animal in a coral, is built like a wheel, with a ring of tentacles around one mouth. Some of them stay fixed to rock like a stalk. Others swim as a soft bell. Most two-sided animals have a head end and a tail end, with matching left and right sides. They run from worms and insects to fish and whales.

Animals live almost everywhere, from shallow rockpools to the deep sea and high mountains. They run from specks too small to see to the blue whale, about as long as three buses in a line.