in order for any organism to survive it has to somehow be adapted to its environment so this could be a polar bear having really thick fur to help it withstand the cold or the big eyes of an owl that allow it to see in the dark because scientists love categories they put these adaptations into three different groups those that are structural behavioral and functional so in this video we're going to take a look at each of these groups and then we'll see how a special group of microorganisms called extremophiles can live in the most extreme places on the planet there's no need to worry about remembering any of the examples we use you just want to be able to understand each type of adaptation so that you can identify them in a given scenario which will practice at the end structural adaptations are the physical features that we see like the organism's shape or colour so if you think of seals and walruses the reason they're this rounded shape is because they live in cold environments so they need a good store of fat and a low surface area to volume ratio which both help them to conserve their body heat and they have this gray brown color to help camouflage them from predators behavioral adaptations are the way an organism behaves or acts so the fact that elephants flapped areas back and forth and spray themselves with water are behavioral adaptations to the hot environment in which they live because both of these behaviors are going to help cool them down similarly swallows and some other birds migrate and fly to warmer countries during the winter which allows them to avoid the cold and lack of food in their summer homes now functional adaptations are the hardest ones to notice these relate to processes going on inside an organism's body like their metabolism or reproductive system for example many desert animals conserve water by producing very little sweat and only small amounts of concentrated urine while camels accumulate lots of fat in their humps which they can then break down later to release water so putting all of this together let's look at a typical question the brown bear also known as ursus actos is found across the northern latitudes of america and eurasia their diet is extremely diverse and variable including plants fungi fish invertebrates and mammals like deer describe how brown bears are adapted to live in their environment feel free to pause the video here and have a think so in a question like this which is six marks we're gonna need six points or probably three different adaptations each with its own explanation but just to be sure we should try to do at least four adaptations the idea with a question like this is not that you're meant to know anything about brown bears but instead by using the picture and the information you can make some good guesses so if we take a look at the text its latin name doesn't really help us but the fact that it lives in northern latitudes tells us that it probably lives in a cold environment so we can make a guess about how it's adapted to survive in the cold like having thick fur which we can see in the picture and as that's a physical feature of the bear we can call it a structural adaptation next we can move on to its diet which it says is extremely diverse and variable so we could say that the bear has become adapted to each a range of different food types and this would actually be a good example of a behavioral adaptation because the fact that the bear would choose due to variety of different things is a way that its behavior has adapted to help it survive we could also look at individual foods like fish or deer and think of how the bears adapted to catch each of them so long sharp claws for catching fish and lots of muscle so they can bring down strong prey like deer and both of these would be examples of structural adaptations you could also use your own knowledge of bears for example you might know that bears hibernate which is actually a slightly more complicated adaptation in one sense this is a behavioral adaptation because the bears overeat in the summer when there's lots of food about and then just lie down in a den and sleep all winter when it's cold and there's no food which are both behaviors but it's also a functional adaptation because their bodies lower their metabolisms right down when they hibernate so they conserve as much energy as possible in a real exam you wouldn't need to write this much as we've done about 12 marks worth of stuff here but hopefully this gives you a better idea of what adaptations are the last thing we need to cover are extremophiles which are microorganisms like bacteria or archaea that are adapted to live in extreme environments for example they can live at really high temperatures in hot springs really high salt concentrations in salt lakes and at really high pressures in deep sea events which on the bottom of the ocean floor and in 2017 astronauts even found bacteria on the outside of the international space station anyway that's all for today so if you found it useful then please do give us a like and subscribe and we'll see you next time