A paramecium keeps bailing itself out. Write the bailing.Fact: a paramecium's contractile vacuoles expel the water that the cell keeps absorbing.
Some things are too small even for this microscope. Write the microscope's admission.Fact: most viruses are too small to be seen with an optical microscope.
A patch of moss on a wall turns out to be crowded. Write the census taker's morning.Fact: tardigrades are common in mosses and lichens and can be viewed under a low-power microscope.
A diatom lives in a house of glass. Write the tour.Fact: a diatom is a single cell surrounded by a cell wall made of silica, called a frustule.
A drop of pond water goes under a microscope. Write the first minute of looking.Fact: an optical microscope uses visible light and a system of lenses to magnify small objects.
A paramecium commutes across one drop of water. Write the trip.Fact: a paramecium propels itself by whip-like movements of cilia set in rows around its body.
A paramecium has lunch. Write it from the first sweep of the cilia to the last.Fact: cilia lining a paramecium's oral groove beat continuously, drawing food into the cell.
A patch of moss on a wall turns out to be crowded. Write the census taker's morning.Fact: tardigrades are common in mosses and lichens and can be viewed under a low-power microscope.
A tardigrade walks across a scrap of moss. Write the walk as the narrator of a nature film.Fact: tardigrades are called water bears for the way they walk, on four pairs of legs that end in claws.
A tardigrade writes to a real bear. Write the letter.Fact: a full-grown tardigrade is usually about half a millimeter long.
Make a field guide page for one living thing too small to see, with a drawing described in words.Angle: size, shape, how it moves, what it eats. Then one thing you could not work out.
Some things are too small even for this microscope. Write the microscope's admission.Fact: most viruses are too small to be seen with an optical microscope.
Someone in the 1600s looks through a new instrument at something ordinary. Write what they say at dinner.Fact: the compound microscope first appeared in the 17th century, and its actual inventor is unknown.
Turn to a stronger lens and the picture changes. Write the same hair, leaf or grain of salt at three strengths.Fact: a microscope's objective lenses sit on a rotating turret, so the magnification can be changed.
Write an apology from a person to the living things in the puddle they just stepped in.Angle: now that you know who lives there.
Write the moment a blur comes into focus, as a mystery being solved.First line: At first it was only a gray smear, and then it had an edge.
Write the point of view of a glass slide: a thin rectangle that everything interesting gets put on.Fact: objects are placed on the microscope's stage and viewed through one or two eyepieces.
Write what yeast is doing in the bowl, for a baker who has never looked through a lens.Fact: yeast is a single-celled fungus. In budding, a small bud forms on the parent cell.
Alive or not 15
A crystal grows in a jar and a mushroom grows in a lawn. Write the two comparing what growing means.Angle: one adds to its outside. One builds itself from within. Is that the difference?
A dried-up tardigrade shows no sign of life at all. Add water. Write the waking.Fact: a dried tardigrade draws in its legs and forms a tun, a state with no metabolic activity.
A flame eats, grows and spreads. Write the trial that decides whether fire is alive.Fact: living things are formed of one or more cells. The cell is the unit of life.
A machine does everything on the list of life but one. Write its story.Angle: choose the one it lacks. Does it mind?
A museum needs two labels: one for something that used to be alive, one for something that never was. Make the difference show.Angle: a wooden spoon and a steel one. A shell and a pebble.
A river and a tree debate which of them is more alive. Write the debate.Angle: the river moves more. The tree answers back. Who judges?
A touch makes a living thing answer. Write three touches: on a stone, on a snail's horn, on a sleeping cat.Fact: response to stimuli is one of the processes that mark life.
A virus arrives at a cell. Write the conversation about whether it counts as living.Fact: a virus replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Whether viruses are alive is disputed.
Dry yeast sits in a cupboard for a year. Write its answer to the question: were you alive in there?Angle: it did nothing for a year and then raised a loaf. What was it doing in between?
Hold a pebble and a seed in one hand. Write how you would show which one is alive.Angle: they look alike and weigh alike. What can only one of them do, given time and water?
Something on another world moves, glitters and grows. Write the scientist's first report on whether it lives.Fact: defining life is hard partly because life elsewhere could be very different from life on Earth.
The weather does its worst and a living thing holds itself steady. Write how.Fact: homeostasis is keeping the inside of the body in a constant state. Sweating to cool down is one example.
Write a seed's years in a drawer as one paragraph, and its first week in soil as another.Angle: one paragraph has no verbs to spare. The other cannot hold them all.
Write the checklist a visitor from another world uses to decide what on Earth is alive, and the first thing that fools it.Fact: life is marked by homeostasis, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli and reproduction.
Write the gray crust on a rock explaining to a hiker that it is alive, and is in fact two things.Fact: a lichen is a partnership of a fungus and an alga.
A body at work 15
A diatom works in the sunlit top of the sea. Write its day.Fact: diatoms generate about 20 to 50 percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year.
A fly lands on a Venus flytrap and touches one hair. Write the next twenty seconds as the plant.Fact: a Venus flytrap closes only if a second trigger hair is touched within about twenty seconds of the first.
A paramecium keeps bailing itself out. Write the bailing.Fact: a paramecium's contractile vacuoles expel the water that the cell keeps absorbing.
A Venus flytrap counts. Write the counting the way the plant itself would say it.Fact: after closing, a Venus flytrap counts more touches of its hairs, to five in all, before it digests.
An earthworm has five pairs of hearts, more or less. Write the meeting where they agree on a rhythm.Fact: in an earthworm, pairs of aortic arches in segments seven through eleven act as hearts.
An earthworm has no lungs. Write one breath as the worm takes it.Fact: an earthworm breathes through its skin, which mucus keeps moist.
An earthworm works one garden bed. Let the soil tell what was different by morning.Fact: worm casts hold nutrients in a form plants can use, which raises the soil's fertility.
Imagine a living body as a workplace with a noticeboard: who is on shift, who is resting, what is being repaired.Angle: any animal or plant but a person. Name three jobs and the part that does each.
Rain falls on a Venus flytrap all afternoon and it never closes. Write why the rain cannot fool it.Fact: a Venus flytrap's trigger mechanism can tell living prey from falling raindrops.
Spend a day shift inside a lichen. Give each partner a voice and one complaint.Fact: a lichen's shape is usually set by the fungus's filaments. The alga is the photosynthetic partner.
Write a paramecium's answer to the question it is always asked: how do you do all that with one cell?Fact: a paramecium is a single cell that swims, takes in food and pumps out water.
Write a plant answering a touch, a shadow or a dry week, slowly enough to see it move.Angle: plants act, only slowly. Speed up the film or slow down the reader.
Write a tardigrade's body shutting down for a drought, one part at a time.Fact: tardigrades can suspend their metabolism and tolerate long periods without water.
Write an earthworm's crawl in slow motion: what stretches, what grips, what follows.Fact: bristle-like hairs called setae anchor parts of an earthworm's body while it moves.
Write one tardigrade leg, of eight, explaining what the claws are for.Fact: each tardigrade leg ends in one or more claws; in some species the claws are sticky pads.
A field notebook 15
A bog in the Carolinas, a small plant with jaws. Write the field notes of the first person to send a description home.Fact: the Venus flytrap is native only to the coastal bogs of North and South Carolina.
A naturalist finds something she cannot name. Write the page of notes she makes so that somebody else can.First line: About the length of my thumbnail, brown above, paler beneath, and it did not like the light.
Choose a living thing you pass every day and have never looked at. Write the first real look.First line: I had walked past it a hundred times and could not have told you its color.
Describe one leaf so exactly that a stranger could pick it out of a pile.Angle: edge, veins, stalk, the two sides. One comparison allowed.
Earthworms leave small coils of soil on a lawn. Give them a notebook page.Fact: earthworms deposit their casts on the surface or deeper in the soil.
End a day outdoors with a page of questions only, each about something alive that you saw.Angle: no answers allowed. Why that side of the trunk? Why only at dusk?
Follow one ant. Write its route as a set of directions.Angle: left at the crack, over the twig, back the same way. Did it meet anyone?
Look closely at moss on a wall and write it as a forest seen from the air.Fact: on mosses, tardigrades can reach a density of over two million to the square meter.
Sit beside one small patch of ground. Write everything alive that crosses it before you get up.Angle: date, place and weather first. Then who came, in order.
Take the notebook out after dark with a flashlight. Write what is awake that you never see by day.Angle: what moves, what calls, and what comes to the light?
Write a field notebook entry for one bird at a feeder: what it did, and nothing about what you think it meant.Angle: it hopped, it looked left, it took one seed. Leave out brave, greedy and shy.
Write the notebook page for a lichen on a tree: color, shape and what it is growing on.Fact: lichens grow on bark and on rock, walls, gravestones and roofs.
Write the notes of someone watching a spider build a web from the first thread.Angle: number the steps as they happen. Look nothing up until the web is done.
Write the same tree on four pages of a notebook, a season apart.Angle: the same branch each time. What is in one entry and gone from the next?
Write two entries on the same pond, one by a person who loves it and one by a person who is cold and bored. Keep the facts the same.Angle: same heron, same reeds, same hour. Only the adjectives move.
How it works
These writing prompts for biology start from looking closely at a living thing: a drop of pond water, a lichen on a rock, an earthworm crossing a path. Facts come from Wikipedia and the US Forest Service.
Read the full guide
Under the microscope, and alive or not
Fifteen prompts look through a lens: a tardigrade crossing a scrap of moss, a paramecium at lunch. Fifteen more ask what counts as living. A flame goes on trial, a virus argues with a cell, and a machine does everything on the list of life but one.
A body at work and a field notebook
The bodies at work belong to a flytrap, an earthworm, a lichen, a tardigrade and single cells, never a person. A Venus flytrap counts touches before it digests. The notebook prompts go outdoors: follow one ant and write its route as a set of directions.
Write what it did before what it is. Names can wait.
Keep one question you could not answer. It is the next prompt.
Questions and answers
What are good writing prompts for biology class?
Ones that begin with something seen. Hold a pebble and a seed in one hand and write how you would show which one is alive. The answer has to use what living things do, and a pebble does none of it.
What makes something alive?
Wikipedia's article on life lists what living things do: keep a steady inner state, use energy, grow, adapt, respond to a stimulus and reproduce. They are made of cells. Viruses do some of this and not all, so whether they are alive is disputed.
What is a tardigrade?
A tiny eight-legged animal, usually about half a millimeter long, also called a water bear. Tardigrades are common in moss and lichen. Dried out, one suspends its metabolism and can tolerate long periods without water.