Zoologist

Pick an animal and be it. Play, and you’ll find out how it lives as you go. Get through its whole life to become a master of it.

• Orangutan

  Be an orangutan high in the rainforest. Learn ripe fruit from Mum, sway trees across gaps, build a nest every night, make tools and raise a baby.

• Pekapeka

  Be a short-tailed bat in the dark New Zealand forest. See with sound, catch moths that can hear you, and find your pup by its call.

• Salmon

  Be a salmon, from an egg in the gravel out to sea and home again. Dodge silt, catch bugs, smell your way up the river and leap the waterfalls.

• African Elephant

  Be an elephant, and the game is your trunk. Drink and spray, roll in mud, swim with your trunk as a snorkel, feel your family's rumbles through your feet, dig for water and lead the family the way Grandma did.

• Octopus

  Change your skin to hide on the reef, taste for crabs with your arms, ink and squeeze away from a seal, and guard your eggs.

• Brown-throated Sloth

  Be a sloth, slow and still. Creep while the eagle looks away, bask in the sun, climb down once a week to poo, swim a river and raise a baby on your tummy.

• Monarch Butterfly

  Hatch on a milkweed leaf, munch, moult and make your chrysalis. Then fly south to Mexico as the super generation.

• Arctic Fox

  Listen for lemmings under the snow, judge your pounce, follow a polar bear for leftovers and raise a big family.

• Honeybee

  Be a worker bee and do every job of her life. Clean cells, feed the babies, make wax and honey, guard the door, then fly to the flowers and tell your sisters the way with a waggle dance.

• Kererū

  Be the big native pigeon that plants the forest. Follow the fruit, drop the seeds, and bring the forest back.

• Kiwi

  Be a kiwi at night. Sniff and dig for worms, hide from stoats, duet with a partner and keep the big egg warm.

• Little Penguin

  Be a kororā. Dive for fish, come home after dark past dogs and cars, sit out the moult, and raise two fluffy chicks.

• Tuatara

  Hatch, hide and hunt one patient step at a time. Share a seabird's burrow and live a hundred years.

• Wētā

  Dig up out of the egg, munch on a big tree at night, moult ten times to grow, and rasp at hungry rats.

• Garden Snail

  Hatch, glide and munch through the garden at night. Stay damp, hide, find a friend and get ready for winter.

• Koala

  Peek out of Mum's pouch, ride on her back, then sniff out the best gum leaves, save your energy and beat a heat wave.

• Zebra

  Stand on wobbly legs, learn your mum's stripes, keep in the herd past lions, let flies bump off your stripes and swim the river past crocodiles.

• Camel

  Be a dromedary in the desert. Grow your hump of fat, keep cool to save water, drink 100 litres at an oasis, shut your nostrils in a sandstorm and walk in a caravan.

• Giant Panda

  Cradle a cub smaller than an apple, hide up a tree, munch bamboo half the day, follow the spring shoots up the mountain and raise a cub of your own.

• Green Sea Turtle

  Dig out of your nest, dash to the sea by the brightest horizon, drift for years in floating seaweed, graze a seagrass meadow and find your way home by the Earth's magnetism.