Even the smallest tide pools are actually entire ecosystems! The creatures that call a tide pool home are connected through food chains that represent the passing of energy from one living thing to another. Readers discover how these unique food chains all come together as they view a helpful tide pool food web. Fun fact boxes accompany informative text about life in a tide pool. Detailed photographs of tide pool ecosystems introduce readers to a variety of cool creatures.

Even the smallest tide pools are actually entire ecosystems! The creatures that call a tide pool home are connected through food chains that represent the passing of energy from one living thing to another. Readers discover how these unique food chains all come together as they view a helpful tide pool food web. Fun fact boxes accompany informative text about life in a tide pool. Detailed photographs of tide pool ecosystems introduce readers to a variety of cool creatures.

Food Chains and Webs explains that feeding relationships are at the heart of life on Earth. It looks at the different types of living thing in a food web - from producer to top consumer - as well as food pyramids and topics like bioaccumulation. It tackles common confusions about the science and shows how topics are relevant to the reader.

Adam Nicolson explores the marine life inhabiting seashore rockpools with a scientist’s curiosity and a poet’s wonder in this beautifully illustrated book. The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes. Look down as you crouch over the shallows and you will find a periwinkle or a prawn, a claw-displaying crab or a cluster of anemones ready to meet you. No need for binoculars or special stalking skills: go to the rocks and the living will say hello. Inside each rock pool tucked into one of the infinite crevices of the tidal coastline lies a rippling, silent, unknowable universe. Below the stillness of the surface course different currents of endless motion—the ebb and flow of the tide, the steady forward propulsion of the passage of time, and the tiny lifetimes of the rock pool’s creatures, all of which coalesce into the grand narrative of evolution. In Life Between the Tides, Adam Nicolson investigates one of the most revelatory habitats on earth. Under his microscope, we see a prawn’s head become a medieval helmet and a group of “winkles” transform into a Dickensian social scene, with mollusks munching on Stilton and glancing at their pocket watches. Or, rather, is a winkle more like Achilles, an ancient hero, throwing himself toward death for the sake of glory? For Nicolson, who writes “with scientific rigor and a poet’s sense of wonder” (The American Scholar), the world of the rock pools is infinite and as intricate as our own. As Nicolson journeys between the tides, both in the pools he builds along the coast of Scotland and through the timeline of scientific discovery, he is accompanied by great thinkers—no one can escape the pull of the sea. We meet Virginia Woolf and her Waves; a young T. S. Eliot peering into his own rock pool in Massachusetts; even Nicolson’s father-in-law, a classical scholar who would hunt for amethysts along the shoreline, his mind on Heraclitus and the other philosophers of ancient Greece. And, of course, scientists populate the pages; not only their discoveries, but also their doubts and errors, their moments of quiet observation and their thrilling realizations. Everything is within the rock pools, where you can look beyond your own reflection and find the miraculous an inch beneath your nose. “The soul wants to be wet,” Heraclitus said in Ephesus twenty-five hundred years ago. This marvelous book demonstrates why it is so. Includes Color and Black-and-White Photographs

Readers investigate simple food chains and natural habitats, including a garden, forest, tide pool, and desert.

Discusses the ocean ecosystem and the role of the sea otter as a keystone species in helping to maintain it, describing the otter's place on the food chain and what would happen if the sea otter were to become extinct.

A meadow is more than just a pretty place to have picnics. It’s home to many species of plants and animals. They’re connected through food chains, and readers explore how individual food chains come together to make a meadow food web. This important science concept is presented through engaging text, as well as a colorful meadow food web that shows a variety of connections among living things in this ecosystem. Fact boxes provide additional information about the plants and animals that live in meadows, and colorful photographs put readers in the middle of this habitat.

A pond is a very unique habitat, home to a variety of freshwater plants, animals, and microscopic creatures. Readers discover how all of these living things are connected through food chains, as they learn fascinating facts about life in a pond. Detailed photographs give readers an up-close look at frogs, algae, and other creatures found in a pond. Fact boxes complement the enlightening text, which explores important science concepts, including conservation and life cycles. Readers can see how these pond food chains come together as they explore an informative pond food web.

Which animals and plants can survive in a dry desert environment? Readers learn about the living things that make up desert food chains, including cacti, snakes, and scorpions. Colorful photographs of desert life make readers feel like they’re exploring new parts of this habitat with each turn of the page. Fact boxes provide additional information about the creatures that make up desert food chains, and a detailed food web shows how these food chains all come together. The desert is an extreme habitat, and readers will enjoy learning about the extreme plants and animals that live there.

Read Along or Enhanced eBook: Tide pools form from water left on rocky shores when the tide withdraws. From seaweed and sea snails to shore crabs and seabirds, readers will discover some of the plants and animals that live in and around these ever-changing ecosystems.