Biodiversity

Walk into a clothes shop where every shirt is white. Boring! In the next shop there are red, yellow, blue, long, short, old and new styles. That variety is what diversity means.

Living things show diversity too. Look around one room: you, a lizard on the wall, a spider on its web, ants round a cup of tea. Outside a dog barks and a cow eats grass. All alive, all different.

In your book, the teacher Madam Sulekha takes her class on a nature walk with two guests: Dr Raghu, a scientist from the nearby Research Laboratory, and Maniram chacha, an elder from a nearby community who can copy bird calls and name many plants and animals. The students see grasses, bushes and large trees, birds on branches, butterflies moving from flower to flower, and monkeys jumping from tree to tree.

They hear birds chirping. Dr Raghu tells them that each bird has its own unique chirp. Even the sounds are different: that is diversity in nature.

The book gives this variety a name. The variety of plants and animals found in a particular region is the biodiversity of that region. (Bio means life.)

Every member of that biodiversity has a role. Trees give food and shelter to birds and other animals. Animals spread seeds after they eat fruits. So plants and animals depend on each other.