By
Dr Letizia Diamante & Ed J. Brown
GROW & GNAW
Rodents (such as squirrels, beavers, and rats) and rabbits have chisel-like incisors that keep growing throughout their lives. To keep their incisors from growing too long, the animals chew on tough foods to wear them down. Can you imagine being able to crack open a walnut or take down a tree just with your teeth? Let’s meet the animals who can.
Squirrel incisors grow at a rate of about 6 inches (15 cm) per year.
DON’T IG-GNAW IT
Rats gnaw almost everything they come across. They’ll munch through wood, cement, rubber, wire, and a long list of other materials. To keep the length of their chompers in check, sometimes they grind them. A rat is more inclined to do that when it is relaxed and content, similar to when a cat purrs. At other times, a rat might behave in this way to comfort itself, especially when it is afraid or in pain.
Squirrels eat lots of different foods, including seeds, fruit, roots, and vegetables. They also love nuts! Squirrels collect and bury nuts underground in the summer and fall, then dig them up in winter, when there’s not much fresh food around.
Not efoarmthe ish Squ Rodents can’t vomit. This is bad news for rats because it’s the reason rat poison is so effective.
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SPEED GNAWERS
You wouldn’t ever need an axe if you had teeth like a beaver’s. A beaver can swiftly chew through trunks, shrubs, and branches, bringing down a 6-inch- (15-cm) wide tree in under an hour. Then it drags the cut log to a river to build a dam and a home for itself (called a lodge).
SPOT THE DIFFERENCE WHO DID THIS?
A lot of animals chew, rub, or claw on shrubs and trees, and some leave behind tell-tale marks that let you know who’s been there. Beavers cut down trees, leaving a conical stump. Porcupines and squirrels climb trees and gnaw the bark (squirrel bite marks are smaller), and bears scratch tree trunks to mark their territory.
BEAVER
SQUIRREL
PORCUPINE
BEAR
Why are beaver teeth orange?
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LONGEST TONGUE Not only do tongues come in various colors, but they also come in many different sizes. Some tongues are teeny while others are looooooong! And some insects have a tonguelike structure called a proboscis. There are many contenders in the animal kingdom for the title of the longest tongue compared to body size. Can you guess which animal will be the winner? Find the answer at the bottom of page 41.
THE WOODPECKER
CONTESTANT
A woodpecker’s beak is strong and sturdy, with a chisel-like tip for drilling holes in the wood and bark of trees. However, the most unusual feature of the woodpecker’s body is its extraordinary tongue, which is nearly three times longer than the bird’s beak.
CONTESTANT
#1
ALL WOUND UP Tongue
THE ANTEATER
Anteater tongues can be twice as long as their heads. Their tongues are covered in a sticky saliva and tiny spikes that act like Velcro to trap their prey. Anteaters slurp ants and termites out of anthills or termite mounds—the equivalent of ant or termite skyscrapers. Anteaters can flick their tongues nearly three times per second!
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A woodpecker’s tongue is so long that it has to wrap around its entire skull to fit inside its head.
#2
THE CHAMELEON
Chameleons have color-changing skin, eyes that can look in almost any direction, and tongues about twice as long as their bodies. A chameleon will often ambush its prey. It will wait until a cockroach, cricket, grasshopper, or butterfly ventures close enough, then it shoots out its tongue—the ultimate weapon.
CONTESTANT
#3
Panther chameleon
Even when a chameleon is focused on hunting, it will notice you if you try to sneak up on it from behind. This is possible because a chameleon’s eyes swivel completely independently of one another. One eye might follow prey while the other looks out for danger and predators.
Chameleons tend to be able to darken or lighten their usual pattern to match their surroundings, but not all of them create particularly vivid colors. The most famous colorful chameleon is the panther chameleon, which is found in the wild only in Madagascar.
A chameleon’s tail and toes grip and wrap around branches while the animal hunts, rests, and eats.
Will this chameleon manage to catch its grasshopper prey?
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Zap! Yes! The chameleon’s sticky tongue successfully captured its meal!
A chameleon hunts by hurling out its tongue to catch prey on the sticky tip and then pulling it back into its mouth. The record for fastest tongue belongs to Rhampholeon spinosus, also known as the rosette-nosed chameleon. It moves from 0 to about 60 miles per hour (almost 100 kph) in one-hundredth of a second, about 200 times faster than a Ferrari SF90 Stradale.
This tongue can pull in an object that weighs up to about a third of the chameleon’s body weight. Can you imagine gobbling up a candy bar that weighs as much as small dog?
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At the tip of a chameleon’s tongue, a thick, honey-like substance—nearly 400 times as thick as our saliva—snags prey and brings it back to its mouth.
R TE
Y FL
O
S SC
URLE D
Butterflies and moths eat with a proboscis, which is curled up like a coiled tape measure and unfurls to extend into a flower’s center. It may look like a long, thin straw, but it works more like a paper towel that absorbs the flower’s sweet nectar.
TH ITS PROB
CI
The tube-lipped nectar bat can extend its tongue one-and-a-half times its body length, longer than any other mammal. This bat seems to have evolved its incredible tongue to feed on a tubular flower found in the cloud forests of Ecuador. It mops up the flower’s nectar with tiny hairs on the end of its tongue. It also collects some pollen on its head, which it spreads from flower to flower, helping the plant to create seeds.
WI
A BUT
THE TUBE-LIPPED NECTAR BAT
CONTESTANT
#5
CONTESTANT
#4
TONGUE STORAGE
THE MORGAN’S SPHINX HAWK MOTH
The tube-lipped nectar bat stows its long tongue inside its ribcage.
The winner is… the Morgan’s sphinx hawk moth! Its tongue is about 10 to 12 inches (25 to 30 cm) long.
Tongue
Naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace separately predicted the existence of a moth with a super-long proboscis more than 40 years before it was discovered. This was because they came across a species of orchid with nectar in a very hard-to-reach spot far inside the flower and thought there should be an insect with a really long proboscis to match. This insect is Morgan’s sphinx hawk moth (also known as Darwin’s moth), which lives in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, and Madagascar and has a tongue that is more than three times longer than its body!
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AUTHOR Dr. Letizia Diamante is a science communicator and children’s writer. After her PhD in Biochemistry, she has worked as a science communicator for a variety of public and private organizations, including CERN and the University of Cambridge, UK. She enjoys writing about great discoveries, taking photos, presenting at schools, organizing events for science festivals, and visiting science museums all over the world. www.letiziadiamante.com
Author: Dr. Letizia Diamante | Illustrator: Ed J. Brown Ages: 7–11 | Price: $21.99 | Format: Hardback Extent: 64pp | Trim size: 11 x 10.2 in | Pub date: 09/03/2024 ISBN: 9781804661369 Join scientist Dr. Letizia Diamante to chomp your way through pages of facts about the most astonishing mouths, sharpest teeth, stretchiest cheeks, and stickiest tongues in the animal kingdom. From the awesome jaws of the great white shark to the tiny teeth of the garden snail, you’ll explore the world’s most marvelous mouths. Some animals sport tongues that are longer than their bodies, others have super-sticky spit that can speedily snare an insect snack. And animals use their mouths for lots of things other than just eating—to carry their food or their babies, to build their homes, or even to climb waterfalls! Discover some of the most important animal body parts that are often overlooked, even though they’re right under our noses!
ILLUSTRATOR Ed J. Brown is a digital illustrator inspired by analogue print processes, overlaid colors, and messy textures. Graduating in 2010, Ed has worked with clients such as Readers’ Digest, Die Zeit, EasyJet, Brussels Air, and Tabasco as well as being a regular contributor to Aquila magazine and releasing his first book, Epic Animal Journeys, in 2022. He loves medieval history, folk art, and drawing animals wearing hats. www.edjbrown.com • •
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A feast for all those children who can’t get enough of sharks, big cats, and other toothy predators. Children aged 7+ are especially aware of their own mouths as they lose their baby teeth and have adult teeth grow in their place. Open Wide! compares their teeth to those of their favorite animals (and some super weird ones, too). Author Dr. Letizia Diamante is a scientist and science communicator with a knack for sharing cutting-edge information in a playful, wow-worthy way that is sure to engage budding young scientists. Stylish illustrations on every page and photographic zoom-ins bring the stories and facts to life. A sneaky lesson in diversity, Open Wide! illuminates the striking range of equipment animals carry in their mouths.
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ISBN 978-1-80466-136-9
9 781804 661369