An atoll is a small island shaped like a ring or horseshoe, found in the warm waters of tropical seas. Inside the ring there is water, called a lagoon. The ring is made of the skeletons of millions upon millions of tiny sea creatures called coral. These creatures live together in huge colonies.
An atoll is a small island shaped like a ring or horseshoe, found in the warm waters of tropical seas. Inside the ring there is water, called a lagoon. The ring is made of the skeletons of millions upon millions of tiny sea creatures called coral. These creatures live together in huge colonies. They live where the water is less than 510 feet deep, because they need sunlight, which cannot reach very far into deep water. Coral like to live in waters that arcclose to the shores of an island.
After thousands of years the skeletons of dead coral form a rock wall like a ring around the island. Then suppose an earthquake causes the island to settle below the water. The coral ring remains, and is an atoll. Dirt, pieces of wood, mud, and other rubbish are washed over the rough coral rock by the waves, and in time soil is formed over the rock. Seeds carried for miles by the ocean winds will drop on this soil and certain kinds of palm trees and other plants will grow on the atoll. Sometimes the waves will break off pieces of the top of the ring or wash away a large section of it so that the atoll has the shape of a horseshoe above the water. The water of the lagoon inside the ring is never very deep. There are many atolls in the South Pacific Ocean.
Spiders In The Garden
Watching for their prey in the centre of a radiating geometrical snare, we often find the garden spiders. The beauty of their vertical orb-webs and the large size of these strikingly marked creatures always attract our attention during summer strolls.
Jack & Jill The Vulture Twins
Probably this story of Jack and Jill, the Vulture Twins, would never have been written, if Betsy, Farmer Parsons' old brindle cow, had not refused to come up from the woods one night. But she wouldn't come, so Farmer Parsons had to go down after her.
At Home With Mr. Burroughs
Youth still peered out at me in spite of his crowning thatch of silvery hair when I first met John Burroughs in 1904. As we walked together on our way to his rustic little house in the woods called "Slab-sides,"
