The animal kingdom is full of creatures of all varieties, including the odd ones. Weird Animals for Kids discusses three strange animals that you may or may not know about. The first is the axolotl. This cute salamander is one of the strangest amphibians in the world. It remains aquatic as an adult because of a condition called neoteny. Axolotls are carnivores and used to be at the top of the food chain in their environment. The introduction of invasive species, however, has changed that dynamic, so they have become endangered in the wild.

Up next is the aye-aye, a rainforest mammal from Madagascar. It's the world largest nocturnal primate, spending 80% of the night foraging for food. Aye-ayes have an long middle finger that they use to find food and extract insects or dig the pulp out of fruit. They help the environment, too, because they eat wood-boring beetle larvae that could otherwise overtake the woods.

Finally, the blobfish. Out of water, these fish look incredibly odd, but they look much more normal in the ocean. They will eat pretty much anything that's edible. And they have no predators because they live so deep that the water pressure is too intense for most predators. Like the axolotl, blobfish are endangered for a couple reasons. While they lay thousands of eggs, only a few survive to adulthood. Overfishing and deep-sea trawling have also caused a huge decline in their populations.

We hope you and your student(s) enjoyed learning about these very unique animals! If you want to learn even more, head over to our website and download one of our many lesson plans, full of activities, worksheets, and more!

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What you will learn in Weird Animals for Kids:
0:00 Introduction
0:19 Axolotls and their diet
1:21 Interesting facts and why axolotls are important
2:09 Aye-ayes and their diet
3:34 Other interesting facts and the importance of aye-ayes
4:25 Blobfish traits and diet
5:24 Interesting facts and importance to the environment
6:28 Review of the facts

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