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Everything Varies

See Also: Everything Varies Materials List | Printable Page | Teachers Suggested Additional Activities Using Everything Varies

There are over 2 million named species of plants and animals on Earth and many scientists feel that the actual number of types of organisms is well over 5 million. Why are there so many different kinds of living things? To start with, we need to know what variation is. It means to be a little bit different from others or from some typical pattern. The Earth offers many different types of places to live, in part, because physical structures such as mountains and water bodies create habitat variation. The shape of the Earth and its rotation around the sun also creates variation in the climate different parts of the world experience. Some areas are warm and wet year around, some areas are warm but dry year around, others are cold year around and places like Tennessee may have warm summers and cold winters with no real dry season. Climate adds to the environmental variability offered by physical structure in habitats. So why are there so many different kinds of living organisms? Organisms vary because everything else varies and each species is adapted (has traits that permit it to do well) to the particular place it lives in and to the food it takes.

In this series of exercises, you will have an opportunity to explore the concept of variation using leaves and seashells. There are eight exercises in all including a mystery shell for you to identify. In Exercise 1. Recognizing Individuals as Unique, you will test your skills in committing a leaf to memory that will vary a lot from many of the leaves available but only slightly from some. Exercise 2 Matching Leaves is another easy game in which you find a match on the leaf key for each leaf you have in a sample. In Exercise 3 Using Math to Make Decisions about Variation in the Characteristics of Leaves, you will learn how to determine how much leaves in a sample vary from ‘a typical leaf’ and the extent to which leaves from different species may vary. Exercises 4 - 6 involve seashells, which protect the soft bodies of snails, clams and their relatives. Exercise 4.Matching Shells is a simple matching game using shells instead of leaves. Exercise 5. Making Sense of Variation: The Game, provides experience with learning how to group organisms of like type together on the basis of the characteristics they share in common. Exercise 6. Finding Species, provides further experience with splitting a sample of individuals into two consecutively smaller groups of like individuals until each group represents a single species. Exercise 7. Mechanisms, gives you some feeling for the sources of trait variation in organisms and Exercise 8. Mystery Identification, tests your thinking skills.

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