Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2025 i National Geographic Kids

Click, click, click, click! I hear a rapid burst of camera clicks, and I see strobe lights flashing in the water. Behind me, my photography partner and husband, David, is furiously trying to get my attention. And by pressing his camera shutter button, he also captures this photo! I turn around to observe this magnificent croc before it calmly swims away. We’re diving through a marine park off the coast of Cuba called the Gardens of the Queen. Thanks to conservation efforts, this special place remains totally wild. We’ve seen American crocodiles here almost every day, as well as mangroves, coral, sharks, and other aquatic life that live here. But a croc has never come so close to us before! American crocodiles in this marine sanctuary are used to humans…

1 Axolotls live in only one place on Earth—central Mexico’s Xochimilco (SO-chee-MILL-koh) canal network. 2 The branches that grow on an axolotl’s head are gills, which help the animal breathe underwater. They keep these branches their whole lives. 3 Almost all wild axolotls are brown, except for some that are born with a genetic condition that makes them pinkish white. 4 Axolotls can regrow a leg in about a month. (Thanks to NGK reader Isabella A. for sharing this fact!) 5 By studying axolotls, scientists may someday learn if it’s possible to regrow human limbs too. 6 According to one myth, the Aztec god of lightning, Xolotl, could escape his enemies by turning into this water creature. (Axolotls are named after him!) 7 If another axolotl gets too close, the disturbed…

1 More than 1,300 Earths could fit inside Jupiter. 2 Jupiter has at least 92 moons. 3 Mercury is the smallest planet in our solar system—and it’s shrinking. 4 The volcano Olympus Mons on Mars is 100 times larger than Mauna Loa, the largest active volcano on Earth. 5 Astronomers think there could be a giant planet beyond Neptune called Planet Nine that could take more than 20,000 years to orbit the sun. 6 our Planets outside solar system are called exoplanets. 7 Each season on Uranus lasts 21 Earth years. 8 The winds on Neptune blow at more than 1,100 miles an hour— 1.5 times faster than the speed of sound. 9 Saturn’s north pole has a huge storm that’s been raging for decades—it has six sides and isnicknamed the Hexagon. 10 Venus is the hottest planet in our solar…

Snooze Cruise School bus–size sperm whales look sort of eerie when they nap vertically in the water. But scientists think these whales sleep like this so they can easily swim up to take a breath when they need to. (Their blowholes are at the top and front of their heads.) So their sleeping style is actually smart, not spooky! Sleep Champ Koalas, found only in Australia, are Earth’s sleepiest animals. These marsupials catch z’s up to 22 hours a day, likely because their eucalyptus meals take so much energy to digest. Sweet dreams, koalas! Catnap Domestic cats like cat trees … and so do leopards! These big cats, found throughout much of Africa and Asia, often bring their prey up into trees to prevent other predators like lions and hyenas…

1 The African elephant has 2,000 genes dedicated to smelling—more than any other mammal. 2 In the summer of 1858, the smell of sewage in London, England, was so bad it became known as the Great Stink. 3 Perspiration is odorless. It’s the bacteria on our skin that causes the smell. 4 Everything smells horrible to people with a condition called cacosmia. Even flowers can smell like rotting fish. 5 The durian fruit is so smelly that it’s banned on Singapore’s public transportation. 6 The dung beetle pollinates a flower that smells like poop. 7 The human nose can distinguish about one trillion different odors. 8 Skunks produce such a powerful odor that people can smell it up to one mile away. 9 Humans are able to smell before they are born. CHECK OUT THE…

Aye-aye TROPICAL FORESTS Meet the aye-aye, possibly the only animal in the world that’s famous for its fingers! This scruffy-looking, nocturnal lemur creeps around among tree branches, tap-tap-tapping on the bark with its super-skinny middle finger. It can tell where tasty grubs are hiding by listening to the sound this makes. When it strikes grub gold, it gnaws a hole, then uses its extra-long fourth finger, with a hooked claw on the tip, to pull out the prey. Darwin’s bark spider RAINFOREST RIVERS Imagine canoeing happily along a river in Madagascar, then suddenly your face gets caught in the world’s biggest spiderweb! That would be the work of Darwin’s bark spider, which spins webs across rivers by letting out a long thread of silk that catches the breeze to the…

1 In a group of 23 people, there’s a 50 percent chance that two people will have the same birthday. 2 The Egyptian hieroglyph for 100,000 was a frog. 3 An icosahedron has 20 sides. It’s been used for dice since ancient Egyptian times. 4 Multiply 1,089 by 9 and you get the exact reverse: 9,801. 5 Zero is the only number that cannot be represented in Roman numerals. 6 In Qatar, the cell phone number 666-6666 sold in 2006 for $2.7 million. 7 Crows can be trained to count aloud. 8 In Japan, they have contests to see how fast kids can add using an abacus. 9 The numbers we write with today were invented in India 2,000 years ago. CHECK OUT THE BOOK!…

WHICH WHALE? To tell humpback whales apart, scientists look at the unique shape, patterns, and markings on the animals’ flukes, which are the ends of their tails. (Humpback whale flukes can reach up to 18 feet wide—about the width of a medium-size truck!) This is how researchers track and study these marine mammals. Look at the photos of Flame, Oscar, Kelp, and Aria’s flukes above. Then, using their unique markings, find the same whale’s tail below. ANSWERS BELOW Answers: Flame: FlukeB, Oscar: FlukeC, Kelp: FlukeA, Aria: FlukeD.…

This landscape looks like a patchwork quilt—but it’s actually a canyon filled with pools of salt! Found in the Sacred Valley region of Peru, which was once the heart of the Inca Empire, this site is still in use today. The area’s famous flavorful pink salt has been harvested here for hundreds of years. The salt comes from salty water that streams from a hot spring above the canyon and trickles into the human-made ponds below. Over time, the water evaporates, leaving behind a layer of salt crystals that can be scraped out and sold in local markets. About 5,000 ponds are scattered throughout the area. Each one belongs to a local family—bigger families have larger pools. CHECK OUT THE BOOK!…

The Himalaya mountains of central Nepal are home to Apis dorsata laboriosa, the largest honeybee in the world. Its honey is prized as a tea ingredient in Japan, China, and Korea and can sell for up to $80 a pound. But collecting the sweet nectar is dangerous business. Local people scale the sheer cliffs where the bees make their nests, climbing as high as a 30-story building—with only homemade rope ladders to hold them! While scaling their shaky rope ladders and waving away angry bees, the honey hunters carry two 24-foot-long bamboo poles. They use one to pry the nests off the rocks, and the other to hold a basket against the cliff facetocatch the falling honeycombs. When they’re done collecting, they hoist about 40 pounds of honey for the…

It might look like someone has been busy with a paintbrush, but these multicolored trees are all natural. The rainbow eucalyptus’s orange-tinted bark sheds in strips, revealing a bright green layer. Over time, the bark matures, and the green changes to red, then orange, purple, and finally, brown. And because the bark is shed at different times, one tree can display all these colors at once. Botanists have tried to grow rainbow eucalyptus trees in gardens, but the colors are never as vibrant as they appear in their natural habitat: the wet, tropical rainforests of Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The trees’ thin layers of bark can be used to make pulpwood, which, surprisingly, is the main ingredient in white paper! CHECK OUT THE BOOK!…

Did you know that the moon’s orbit, or movement around the Earth, isn’t in the shape of a circle? It’s actually elliptical, or more like an oval. So the moon’s distance from Earth varies as it travels its orbit. At its farthest point, the moon is about 252,724 miles away from Earth. At its closest, it’s about 221,441 miles away. When the moon is at its closest point and also full, we call it a supermoon. This happens about once a year. (Supermoons are getting smaller. That’s because the moon is slowly moving away from Earth, at 1.5 inches each year.) Superstition says that the supermoon causes everything from madness to flooding. But while there’s zero evidence that this phenomenon has any effect on people’s behavior, supermoons can actually change…