"The Great Discovery of the Little Frog" I bought according to the author. Tatsuyo Matsuoka was one of the earliest children's book authors I knew, and his "Jump" and "Wow" were the first children's books I bought for Orange, and they were the most popular children's books, far exceeding the classic picture books such as "My Dad", "My Mom" and "Hungry Caterpillar" that I bought at the same time.
Why? Because the interactivity of these two books is unparalleled.
"Bungee" is the action of various animals to make a jump, and "Wow" is the action of animals making wow. As long as I made a jump up or yelled wow, Orange, who was not yet a year old at the time, would giggle incessantly. She couldn't even stand steadily, and she wanted to jump with me.
Because I was so impressed with these two frogs, I didn't hesitate to buy it back when I saw This "The Great Discovery of the Little Frog" by Tatsuyo Matsuoka.
When I bought it back and read it for the first time, I was disappointed, it was a very, very difficult popular science book, not suitable for oranges who are now more than 3 years old, and I once wanted to throw it in the bookcase.
Because at first glance at this book, it is easy to find the point. The whole picture is full of all kinds of animals and plants, dazzling. In addition, the names of these animals and plants are all very standardized scientific names, and if it were not for the publisher's kind labeling of pinyin on the strange characters, I would not even be able to read them. Even if it is pronounced according to pinyin, if I don't Baidu, I don't know what kind of animals and plants I am talking about. For example, The Qianbo cetacean (cong) and the Chinese scorpion bug. At the moment, I have compared these names with the book several times, for fear of typing them wrong.
But this is Tatsuyo Matsuoka, Tatsuyo Matsuoka, who wrote such a fun children's book as "Bungee" and "Wow", and I decided to sink my heart and look at it again. This time, I put aside all those annoying scientific names and just looked at the picture. I meditated in my mind that this was a dragonfly, this was a butterfly, this was a bird, this was a bug, whatever its name, and then looked for the main line of Little Frog's Great Discovery.
I read the whole book at a very slow pace and couldn't help but sigh, yes, this is Tatsuo Matsuoka. I almost missed a great popular science enlightenment book, whether it is three years old or eight years old, you can read it to your children.
1
This "The Great Discovery of the Little Frog" is one of the few science books on the market that talks about ecosystems, and through the travel of a small frog, it shows the three major ecosystems of ponds, rivers and forests.
What is an ecosystem? Baidu Encyclopedia says this:
Ecosystem abbreviation eco, is the abbreviation of ecosystem, refers to a certain space in the natural world, organisms and the environment constitute a unified whole, in this unified whole, organisms and the environment between each other, mutual restrictions, and in a certain period of time in a relatively stable state of dynamic equilibrium.
So what is mutual influence? What are mutual constraints? What is Dynamic Balancing? This little picture book actually explains everything clearly.
2
Let's start with the first ecosystem mentioned in the book, ponds.
The organisms living in ponds can be roughly divided into three categories:
The first category is domestic swallows, butterflies, dragonflies, mosquitoes, etc. flying in the air;
The second type is all kinds of small insects that grow in water or on the surface of water, such as water weasel (min), soy sauce (chi) nails, etc.;
The third type is the red-bellied salamander, frog, tabby neck snake and so on that grow in the water.
Through the experience of the little frog, the author shows a biological chain: frogs eat locusts, mosquitoes and other insects - tabby neck snakes eat frogs.
3
The little frog felt that the pond was dangerous and wanted to leave the pond and go to the river to see. Compared with ponds by the river, there are many more animals growing here.
First of all, there are different kinds of water birds along the river, such as herons, kingfishers, cormorants, and only domestic swallows on the pond;
Secondly, the animals living in the water are also more abundant, with various types of fish, crabs, river shrimp and crayfish;
Similarly, there are many more insects of all kinds and small insects in the water.
The little frog sees the kingfisher eating fish, and then the kingfisher tells it that the heron on the shore wants to eat it, which is another food chain: the frog eats mosquitoes — the heron eats the frog.
4
The river is much more dangerous than the pond, and the little frog chooses to leave the river and go to the forest to see. There is no water in the forest, it is all trees, and the animals living here are very different from the creatures at the water's edge. According to the layering from top to bottom:
There are various birds in the air;
There are all kinds of insects in mid-air and all kinds of small insects living in trees;
There are rats, ferrets, snakes and other animals on the land of the forest;
There are also many insects that live in the forest land, such as dung beetles, stripes, earthworms and so on.
The little frog saw more food chains in the forest:
The first one: The dragonfly eats the moths in the air - the dragonflies are eaten by the jays again.
Second: Rats eat fruit, frogs eat fruit, flowers of insects - owls, goshawks, snakes and other animals eat mice and frogs - ferrets eat snakes.
5
Tatsuo Matsuoka shows the three major ecosystems of ponds, small rivers and forests, where organisms and organisms, organisms and the environment affect and restrict each other. If you look closely, you can also find more ecologically balanced food chains:
The faeces of animals are broken down by dung beetles, which are its food and home, and dung beetles lay eggs in their feces in addition to eating feces.
The leaves in the forest are eaten by insects and earthworms and then converted into nutrients in the soil, allowing the trees to grow more luxuriantly.
So apart from the balance within each ecosystem, are there connections between ecosystems? The answer, of course, is yes.
The soil in the forest flows with the rainwater into the river and the pond, the aquatic weeds and zooplankton absorb the nutrients in the soil to grow, the aquatic grass releases oxygen to purify the water in the pond and feed the fish in the pond, and the zooplankton is the food of the fish, lobsters, etc. in the pond, and then the fish become the food of the birds on the shore.
If you look closely, you can also find that the distribution of species and numbers of organisms in the ecosystem is pyramidal. Ponds and rivers, for example, have the most plankton at the bottom, followed by fish, lobsters, etc., and the birds on the shores with the fewest.
This is actually a feature of the ecosystem:
Creatures that grow at the bottom are so easily eaten that they must reproduce faster, with a large number of reproductions at a time. In order to survive, there are many numbers and rapid reproduction. For example, mosquitoes lay eggs 6 to 8 times, and the number of eggs laid each time is 200 to 300, and it only takes about 14-18 days from eggs to adults.
Organisms at the top of the food chain are few and slow to reproduce. For example, cormorants, adult cormorants give birth in April to June each year, laying 3-5 eggs at a time, from eggs to adulthood, it takes up to 3 and a half years.
This is the right way to open the book:
The first step is to explain the food chain one by one, which is the most important part of the book, and to delete the complexity and simplify it, in order to find the main line.
In the second step, with spare energy, parents can first Baidu out of the habits of animals and plants, and then explain more related knowledge. At the bottom of each page, the author shows it:
First talk about the face, and then talk about the point, so as not to be confused by various complex names of animals and plants, so as to easily give up this wonderful popular science picture book.
6
Finally, it must be pointed out that now we rarely see clean ponds, clear rivers, and completely pristine forests, because human intervention has destroyed the ecological balance. Humans pollute water sources, so that the creatures in the water can not survive, and nature affects the water birds on the shore. Humans cut down forests, depriving animals of their natural environment to grow, catching birds, catching snakes, and destroying food chains.
Protecting the environment is everyone's responsibility, and that sounds like a slogan. However, combined with this "The Great Discovery of the Little Frog", and then looking back at this sentence, we can deeply appreciate how self-consistent these ecological environments are without human intervention. The most important thing for human beings to do is to do nothing and maintain the most natural and primitive state of the ecological environment.