Nocturnal Animals – Greenwood Guides to the Animal World

Beautifully illustrated, with numerous color images, Nocturnal Animals provides copious material for understanding these unusual animals. The book provides a thorough guide, perfect for research papers in biology classes, for understanding the behavior and biodiversity of a fascinating and unusual group of animals.

We share the earth with a wide variety of animal species, each of which brings something special to the diversity of the planet. By knowing more about how animals behave and live, we gain a greater understanding of how life evolved and the importance of biodiversity. This book is about the animals that rise when the sun sets and are active throughout the night. Nocturnal Animals examines how such animals live and explains their highly developed senses that enable them to survive in the dark, as well as their behavior and adaptations to avoid sunlight and predators during the day.

Nocturnal Animals provides an in-depth discussion of the behaviors of this fascinating group of animals, for example:
• Snakes have special senses - their flicking tongues bring scent particles to an organ in the mouth, and rattlesnakes have special heat-sensing pits that locate a small rodent by its body warmth.
• The highly developed sight of tree-living frogs allow them to jump from branch to branch in the dark
• Owls can locate a mouse in complete darkness because of their accute hearing
• Bats send out high frequency signals - some species actually through their noses - and hear the returning echoes in time to fly through a forest at full speed