Animals and nature guide
Updated
Nature prompts are huge. There are thousands of bird species, hundreds of dog breeds and a long list of named dinosaurs. The trouble is that memory serves up the same zoo animals every time.
Use the tree of life
Biology already sorts living things into nested groups, and that structure is a ready-made search route. For “name an animal that…” prompts, walk the big groups: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, arachnids, crustaceans, molluscs. People forget the invertebrates, which is where many deep answers live.
Use habitats and continents
- Habitat: rainforest, desert, deep sea, polar, freshwater, cave.
- Continent: Australia and Madagascar are packed with animals found nowhere else.
- Island extinctions: for “flightless bird” prompts, think beyond ostrich and penguin to islands: the dodo of Mauritius, the kakapo and takahe of New Zealand, the extinct moa.
Small categories: think species and subspecies
Some animal prompts are small, like “name a great ape”. Everyone says gorilla, chimpanzee and orangutan. The rarer answers come from the scientific split: there are three orangutan species (Bornean, Sumatran and the Tapanuli orangutan described in 2017), two gorilla species with named subspecies such as the mountain gorilla and Cross River gorilla, the bonobo, and, if the prompt allows it, humans. See Name a great ape.
Breeds and varieties
Dog, cat and horse breeds respond well to two questions: where is it from and what was it bred for. Hungarian herding dogs (Puli, Komondor, Mudi), Japanese breeds (Shiba Inu, Akita, Kai Ken), sled dogs, scent hounds.
Behaviour-based prompts
Some prompts describe what an animal does: animals that spray, glow, migrate or change colour. Think of the behaviour first and the animals second. For defence sprays, for example: skunks, but also bombardier beetles, horned lizards that squirt blood from their eyes, and fulmar chicks that spit stomach oil.
Non-living nature
Clouds, gemstones and weather have tidy scientific classifications too. Cloud types follow a naming system (cirrus, cumulus, stratus and their combinations), and that system will generate correct rare answers like altocumulus or cirrostratus if you know the pattern.
Practise
Study the prompts below and then play unlimited dives. Science-minded players should also read the science guide.