--- title: The polar zone: arctic foxes, snowy owls, lemmings and reindeer — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «The polar zone: arctic foxes, snowy owls, lemmings and reindeer», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: The polar zone shows how animals beat the cold: the arctic fox has small ears, short legs and a short nose --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / The polar zone: arctic foxes, snowy ow… # The polar zone: arctic foxes, snowy owls, lemmings and reindeer Lesson 106 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/0/) — The polar zone shows how animals beat the cold: the arctic fox has small ears, short legs and a short nose, because small body parts lose less heat, and its winter coat is so warm it hardly needs to shiver. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/1/) — Many Arctic animals change with the seasons: the arctic fox is white in winter and brown or grey in summer, reindeer eyes turn from golden to blue for the dark winter, and reindeer hooves harden to cut into ice. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/2/) — Think of your own winter clothes: a windproof jacket over a soft woolly jumper, and the musk ox wears exactly that, long outer hair against wind and snow over a soft underwool warmer than sheep's wool. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/3/) — Rudolph's glowing nose, Hedwig the owl and lemmings jumping off cliffs all come from films; the real stories are a nose full of warm blood, owls that hunt by daylight in summer, and a cliff scene that film makers faked. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/4/) — Arctic foxes moult from white in winter to brown or grey in summer so they match snow and then rocks, and their winter coat is so warm they do not start to shiver until it is about minus 70 degrees. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/5/) — Arctic foxes have small ears, short legs and short noses that lose little heat, while the desert fennec fox has huge ears that give off heat to keep it cool. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/6/) — Snowy owls hunt in daylight in the Arctic summer, when the sun never sets, and eat mostly lemmings, raising many more chicks in good lemming years; Hedwig in Harry Potter was a snowy owl, played by whiter male owls. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/7/) — Lemmings are small tundra rodents whose numbers rise and fall hugely every few years; in crowded years they spread out and some drown crossing rivers, but they do not jump off cliffs on purpose. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/8/) — The cliff-jumping lemming myth was spread by a 1958 Disney film in which the film makers pushed lemmings over a cliff. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/9/) — Reindeer, called caribou in North America, are the only deer in which both males and females grow antlers; females keep theirs in winter to defend food they dig from the snow, while adult males usually drop theirs in early winter. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/10/) — Reindeer eyes change from golden in summer to blue in winter, which helps them see in the long dark winter. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/11/) — Reindeer feet make a clicking sound from tendons as they walk, which may help a herd keep together in snowstorms, and their hooves are soft in summer for boggy ground and hard in winter to cut into ice. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/12/) — A reindeer's nose is packed with tiny blood vessels that warm the cold air it breathes, and scientists once wrote a joke-serious study on why Rudolph's nose could be red. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/14/) — Some zoos keep Antarctic penguins such as king and gentoo penguins in chilled rooms with artificial snow and lights that copy Antarctic days and nights; Edinburgh Zoo's king penguin Sir Nils Olav is an honorary officer in the Norwegian army. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/15/) — Belugas are white Arctic whales that whistle and chirp, called «sea canaries»; many people now think whales should not live in tanks, and some belugas were moved to a sea sanctuary. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/106-the-polar-zone-arctic-foxes-snowy-owls-lemmings-reindeer/16/) — The Arctic is a frozen ocean surrounded by land, with land predators like foxes and bears, while Antarctica is ice-covered land surrounded by ocean, with no land mammals at all, only seals that live mostly at sea. - ← previous: [The polar zone: polar bears](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/105-the-polar-zone-polar-bears/) - next →: [The Asian forest area: giant pandas, red pandas, tapirs and sun bears](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/107-the-asian-forest-area-pandas-red-pandas-tapirs-sun-bears/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)