Feral arrangement

Author: Zsóka Vásárhelyi

Recommended age: 3-99

Number of players: 1-30

Space needed for the game: -

Difficulty level: 1

Playing time: 5-15 minutes

Preparation time: 10-30 minutes beforehand

Accessories: pictures of animals (For an example see below, but I would suggest collecting pictures specifically for the game you are playing. If you are looking for similar to these, below, type "animal silhouette” in your search engine.)

Short description: Rapid “arrangement” tasks related to the introduction of taxonomy, adaptation to the environment, and other evolutionary topics.

Preparations: Cut the animal pictures and stick them to a thicker paper, so that you can use them easier, or several times without destroying them too much.

Course of the game: You can split your participants into several smaller groups, or can simply gather them together around a large desk. If you have split them into several groups, make sure all groups have enough animal pictures. Then, give them the tasks below, one by one, in any order, but matching their age and levels of knowledge. Following every task, discuss shortly its biological background. Apart from the tasks I have listed here, you can (and should!) create many more tasks, even specifically to elucidate certain biological questions. I suggest solving tasks, where there is not only one proper solution, and talk about the alternative solutions, too.

Possible tasks (and the related biological topics):

1: Line up the animals according to the number of their legs/feet. Does the same number of legs means relatedness? (Taxonomy)
2: Make small groups of animals in a way that only the close relatives are together. Check the groups together! (Taxonomy)
3: Line up the animals according to their size! Are there any similarities between small and large animals, apart from their size? (Taxonomy, Adaptation)
4: Look for pairs who look similar but are NOT closely related! Why do they look similar? How could this happen? (Convergent evolution, Adaptation)
5: Make groups of animals according to the type of environment they live in (e.g. water, or very cold places)! Look for similar characteristics and think about why they have these. (Adaptation)
6: Line up animals according to how closely related they are to humans. Do we have traits common with even the most distant relatives? Can you list traits that appeared somewhere “along the way”? Do we have any traits that are only common with the closest relatives? Do we have traits that are unique to humans? (Taxonomy, Human evolution)

Biological background: I outlined a couple of possible discussion points below. Naturally, as the tasks should be fit to the playing group, so are the topics for discussion.

1: Generally it is true that closely related species have the same number of legs/feet, but the opposite is not true. That is, the same number of legs/feet do not necessarily means close relatedness. For instance, birds and humans all have 2 legs, still, they are quite distant relatives. There are also animals with no legs at all. These can be primarily legless, such as earthworms, or legless by “losing” their legs, such as snakes.
2: Close kin are often not who look very similar. It is a common mistake, for example, to believe dolphins and sharks to be closely related, while one is a fish, the other one is a mammal, and only their similar lifestyle accounts for their similar looks. And another interesting fact about Cetaceans: Cetaceans are more closely related to even-toed ungulates (e.g. the giraffes) than how close odd-toed ungulates (e.g. horses) are related to them. Thus, even if giraffes and horses look much more similar to each other than giraffes to dolphins, the latter are the closer relatives. Again, the similar looks of all four-legged ungulates can be attributed to their shared life-style.
3: Body size is often dependent on lifestyle. For example, larger animals are typically herbivores, not predators. Furthermore, the largest animals are living in oceans, not on land. But size also depends on the animal’s body plan. For example, vertebrates, which have an internal supporting bone structure, can grow much larger on land than invertebrates with no or only outer structures. So in this sense we can easily find similarities among animals of similar body sizes
4: We have already encountered the phenomenon of adaptation to a lifestyle or an environment. This is one of the most important elements of evolution. Every single environment makes its inhabitants face various difficulties. Arctic areas are always very cold, equatorial ones are very hot, and in between the two you have an ever changing climate. Under different climates, very different anatomical features and lifestyles are optimal. But the lifestyle itself can influence anatomy: predators generally need to be fast, strong (or venomous), animals living underground need to be able to orientate without visionary clues, and flying animals need wings and very light bodies. Those who bear the best features in a given environment, will have the most descendants, thus the best adapted features will be overrepresented in the next generations. This is the reason why distant relatives with similar lifestyles have looks that resemble each other.
5: See 4.
6: During phylogeny, it is generally true that if an organism bears certain traits, its descendants will either bear the same traits or bear these in a cryptic way. A nice example for this rule is the anatomy of whales. Whales live underwater for tens of millions of years, yet, they still use their lungs for breathing. Even if it would be much more comfortable for whales to breathe as fish do, because of their descent as mammals and their genetically inherited anatomy, they have to come to the surface from time to time to refill their lungs. If you compare humans with other mammals from this point of view, it comes natural that our basic organs, such as our lungs, heart, etc, are very similar to their organs. At a first glance it seems that only our behaviour is what truly differentiate us from other mammals, but even our behaviour is very similar to those of chimpanzees. But if you look a bit further, e.g. in the direction of Arthropods, you find much less common traits. Arthropods are invertebrate, they have no closed circulatory system, so that their “blood” just washes their organs, and so on. But even so, it is worth looking for similarities among us, too. For example, they have the same types of sensory organs: they too have visual, chemical and tactile senses.

References: own idea