A is for...

I'll never remember the difference between an alligator and a crocodile.  That's just a fact of life for me.  No matter how many times I look up the facts and re-educate myself on the topic, I forget seconds later.  But you'll never see me spending even an entire second worrying about this fact of life either.  So the above statement isn't meant to make you worry about me.  I'm not worried, so you shouldn't be either.  And hey, maybe you have the same problem, in which case we should get some tea and talk about it together.  Maybe we'll form a support group, I'd be up for something like that if you would.

But I'm moving away from the real reason for this post, which is:  I used to talk to kids about science.  All the time.  And there was one class that I taught where we would talk about the inherited traits of animals and how those traits helped them in their ecosystems.  Alligators or crocodiles, which ever one I would talk to them about, have some pretty cool inherited traits.  Like their color and scales, which help them to blend into their environment.  Or their jaw strength.  Their jaws are much stronger when they are biting down then when they are opening up.  That's why an alligatordile (new term coined by me) will sit in the water with it's mouth partly open to catch some dinner, as opposed to keeping it closed and then opening it really fast only to bite down again.  That's also why when I wrestle an alligator, I just put a piece of tape around his mouth to keep it closed and win every time, impressing all of my friends.

Here is a picture of me wrestling an alligator:

Oh wait, the alligatordile newsreel must have gotten mixed up with my fish dinner newsreel.

Maybe I can find that picture some other time...

But this brings me to my next point.  You can admire alligatordiles without even knowing any information about them.  Aliza would fit into this category of person.  She does know one good fact about them though and that is that they start with the letter  A!