These jelly beans are pretty much the same.

If one was yours and you dropped it in my hand, you would have a hard time picking it out.

These jelly beans are not the same.

There are lots of different kinds.

We could say this handful has a lot of diversity.

This is how nature works!

Theme Music Music The organisms in a healthy community of living things are more like this handful.

Most healthy communities have a lot of different kinds of creatures.

Music When we talk about kinds of creatures, we used the term species.

Species are groups of organisms that, under natural conditions, produce fertile offspring only with others of their kind.

These butterflies, for example, can breed to make more butterflies of their kind.

So they're in the same species.

Species diversity is the number of different kinds of animals in an area.

There are more than a million species on Earth.

We've only found a fraction of them, so we don't know exactly how many more there are.

We do know that most of them are less than an inch long, and that about 85% of species are insects.

Among the animal species, one out of five is a beetle.

Warm, wet places like rainforests have an extra measure of diversity.

Rainforests cover a small amount of earth, but most of the species live in them.

There may be millions of undiscovered species hidden in the rainforest, the deep ocean, and forests to the Pacific Northwest and in other places.

There could be millions more species.

To try to understand the world's diverse species better, scientists have put them into five big groups called kingdoms.

There's the group we’re in: those with more than one cell than ingest their food and have scent organs.

These are the animals.

Then there are the species that use photosynthesis.

The plants.

Another kingdom doesn't make their food like plants, but absorbs instead.

These are the molds and mushrooms called fungi.

Microscopic species such as the bacteria are in a group called monerans.

There's also a catchall group called protists, that includes things ranging from single cell microbes like amoebae to large species with many cells like kelp.

Just about everywhere on Earth, species from all these kingdoms are interacting with each other and with non-living things like soil and the climate.

The whole web of these interactions is called an ecosystem.

The forest, desert, and lake communities can also function as ecosystems and are made of lots of different species.

It's easy to see the web of interactions in a lake ecosystem.

The sun helps algae grow, making oxygen and food for microbes and animals.

Fish eat the microbes, absorb oxygen through their gills and make carbon dioxide that the plants use.

If any of these species disappeared, everything else would be affected.

When ecosystems have lots of species, they recover better and faster from disasters such as human impacts, storms, volcanic activity, drought, or climate change.

It's important to take care of natural habitats so that all the species that depend on those habitats can survive.

You don't have to go far to find species diversity.

Dave and I are going to go sweep for insects in a field near the Nature Center, and see how many different kinds of insects we can find.

Music Dave, what are you doing?

Hi, Patrice.

I'm sweeping this whole field for insects.

So what types of insects do you have here?

There, hopefully there will be a whole lot of different species in here.

Do you want to pick up that jar there, Patrice?

And I'll just knock some of these insects down in the bottom that I've already caught.

Let's see, see what we've got.

I've been collecting for a while, as you can see.

Carefully get these in here.

How about if you pick up a net here, and if you help me collect, then we'll collect a little bit more and we'll take a look at what we've got.

You know, Patrice, this old field is a great place for insects to live in because the sunlight gets in here.

But there's all this diversity of plant life too, and because the plants provide the food for so many of these insects, that's why we have so many different kinds.

It's also why we have a lot of the insects to eat other insects, too, because they're in here looking for some of the insects that eat the food or eat the plants as food.

And you can dump that right in here.

Oh, looks like you've got a good one, there.

That's it.

Great.

So should we take a look at what we've got?

Yeah.

Let's do it.

We're going to walk out to this white cloth that I set out, because it's a great place to see all these different kinds of insects in action.

Okay.

Now, if you look in the jar, you can see it's almost impossible with sweep nets not to catch a lot of plant material in the process.

And you can see some of the insects in here.

But I will be able to see a lot more of them when we dump them out here.

Okay.

What do you think's going to happen?

Some of them are probably going to fly.

You betcha.

They're going to fly.

Music Whoa.

Look at these guys go!

There's a couple of earwigs trying to make a move.

We've got another species of bug crawling on my hand here.

And we don't just have bugs in here though.

We have a lot of other species of insects.

It would be almost impossible to tell what we all have completely.

But if we just get a quick count and look at the number of - Got some leaf hoppers.

We've got some spiders here too, which are great.

I notice that we have some crab spiders in here.

So, Dave, do you think you could do this anywhere?

Well, we can look for species diversity just about anywhere.

We probably wouldn't use the same technique as using the sweep nets like we did in the old field here.

But, you know, you can find species diversity just about anywhere.

And a good place to find species diversity is in the woods.

Music That slimy, wet covering on a rotting leaf is alive.

The slime is actually microorganisms working to decompose the leaf.

Turn over a dead log.

The underside is crawling with millipedes, pill bugs, and other small creatures.

On the base of trees, you'll find lichen, moss, and fungi.

If you're looking for species diversity, the forest floor is a great place to start.

Slugs and snails can often be found on the forest floor.

They're mollusks.

Land mollusks live out of water but must remain moist.

If they don't, they'll dry up and die.

Isopods also live on the forest floor.

Isopods are crustaceans.

Crustaceans have hard shells and use gills to breathe.

Even those that live on land, like the woodlouse or the pill bug.

Centipedes and millipedes have an exoskeleton, too.

Millipedes have two pairs of legs for each body segment.

Centipedes look a lot like millipedes, but they have only one pair of legs per segment, and their legs are longer.

Unlike millipedes, they're predators.

They hunt spiders, flies, and other centipedes.

Under the leaves, you'll also find mammals like shrews and voles.

Red efts are amphibians that have poisonous skin.

Their bright orange color and red spots are a warning to birds that they're toxic.

Red efts start their life cycle in the water, then spend about three years on land.

They return to the water to mature and spend the rest of their lives there.

Once in the water, their skin turns green with red spots and they're now called red- spotted newts.

Hundreds of other organisms live on the forest floor.

They all contribute to the species diversity of the forest and the health of the planet.

There’s species diversity all around us.

You just have to know where and what to look for.

But there are people who can teach us just how to do that.

That's right.

Morrisa and Octave are going to join Susan Morse of Keeping Track as they discover the diversity of animals where she lives.

Music Really special, but you have to move slowly.

Move too fast and - There's one right there.

Oh, wow.

Look at that.

That's a good one.

So, Octave, why don't you get out the bandanna so we can figure out what this is?

It’s kind of like a dog track.

Or a coyote.

Yeah, It does look like dog track.

The coyote, for example, is in the dog family.

And that's what I think it is.

That's a perfect track.

It doesn't get any better in that.

Now we're getting up into moose ville here.

Oh.

We are.

Yeah.

That's good.

It’s where the mooses hang out.

Especially in the summer.

Wow.

The tree looks pretty interesting.

Were you looking at this?

Yeah, it looks pretty green.

Yeah, this notch.

You're right.

Why would it be peeling?

The tree is doing that naturally.

That's not part of its bark.

And this is your clue right here.

That one mark.

Who would have flat, sharp edged, chisel-like teeth that would scrape upwards on the bark?

A moose.

Yeah.

And the moose is doing this.

It's called barking or bark stripping because they eat the inner bark.

Music See, the bears have been (inaudible) here .

They've been climbing the beech trees.

The bareness is a bunch of branches that the bear broke from the outermost part of the crown.

If a bear climbed that tree to break those branches, he gets the beech nuts, what will we see on the trunk?

Claw prints.

There you go.

Let's go see.

See if you can put your fingers where the bear's fingers were.

Yeah.

Right.

All five?

Yeah.

Wow.

How do animals influence the biodiversity in their habitat?

You see this seed here?

It’s a beech nut.

The bear's going to eat the nut that's inside here.

But the seed is going to pass through.

Those seeds are going to grow into trees.

Oh, give that tree a hug.

Brought along my friend today.

I call him Yorick.

This is a bear skull.

And Yorick has taught me how to appreciate bears’ sign on what we call mark trees.

They bite them.

They claw them.

That's a pretty good sized paw.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

That's a big bear.

So one of the things we do with Keeping Track is we collect data on this kind of thing.

And that way, our communities know where the animals are.

We know what habitats are important to the animals, and hopefully we can do a better job of planning for the protection of those habitats.

Nature really needs that diversity of habitat types, too.

And this habitat type is especially good for bobcat.

Can’t you just picture one in that little hole?

Yeah.

So there has to be diversity in the landscape too.

You know, not just in the animals themselves and in the plants, but also diversity in the topography and diversity in how many rivers and streams and wetlands there are in all .

So we're at the wetlands now.

This is where the bobcat was heading.

What do you think?

Do all the animals use this wetland as a resource?

Absolutely.

The bobcat does, the moose does, the coyote comes.

We've talked a lot about diversity today.

Why is diversity important?

Oh, it's important for all the living species that have to be here on the planet with us, certainly, they couldn't exist without diversity.

They need all the different kinds of food and cover that these different plant communities make.

They need the different resources, like this wetland, to find different kinds of food.

And there's a lot more diversity out here.

I think we should go see what we can find.

Okay.

There ottter be otters out here!

Otter before otters out here.

What have we learned today?

All the living organisms in the community interact with each other in some way, and they're important for the community’s survival.

Healthy natural communities have lots of different living organisms in them.

Species are groups of organisms that can mate and produce offspring.

Species diversity helps keep natural communities healthy.

Now you know how nature works!

Theme Music Major funding for Nature Works was provided by American Honda Foundation.

Additional funding was provided by Alice Freeman Muchnic, Alice J. Reen Charitable Trust, Cogswell Benevolent Trust, the Finisterre Fund, Greater Piscataqua Community Foundation, Morgridge Family Trust, the Natural Areas Wildlife Fund, Rawson L. Wood.

(animal sounds)