--- title: Counting animals: legs, arms, wings and tails — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Counting animals: legs, arms, wings and tails», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Counting is one of a scientist's best tools: the number of legs, arms or wings tells you what kind of animal you are looking --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/) [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/) / Counting animals: legs, arms, wings an… # Counting animals: legs, arms, wings and tails Lesson 40 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 15 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/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/0/) — Counting is one of a scientist's best tools: the number of legs, arms or wings tells you what kind of animal you are looking at, even when it looks like something else. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/1/) — Count a beetle on a leaf: three legs on each side, six in all, and every one of them grows from the middle part of its body, the thorax, one pair on each of its three sections, as in every adult insect. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/2/) — Spiders have eight legs, octopuses eight arms, squid eight arms plus two longer tentacles, a woodlouse fourteen legs and a crab ten, counting its claws. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/3/) — Names can trick you: a centipede never has exactly a hundred legs, most millipedes have far fewer than a thousand, and a starfish is not a fish and can have five arms or twenty-four. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/5/) — Every adult insect has exactly six legs in three pairs, all fixed to the thorax; a caterpillar has six true legs at the front, and its stumpy back «legs» are fleshy grippers, not true legs. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/7/) — An octopus has eight arms with suckers all along them, and scientists call them arms, not tentacles. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/8/) — A squid or cuttlefish has eight arms plus two longer tentacles with suckers only on their wide tips, ten limbs in all. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/9/) — Centipedes have one pair of legs on each body section and always an odd number of pairs, so no centipede has exactly 100 legs; the common brown garden centipede has 30. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/10/) — Most millipedes have between about 30 and 400 legs, two pairs on each double section; one found in Australia in 2021 had 1,306 legs. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/11/) — Most starfish have five arms, but some kinds have more, and the sunflower sea star can have up to 24; a lost arm can grow back, and each arm has a small eye at its tip. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/12/) — All birds have two wings and two legs; most have four toes on each foot, but the ostrich has only two. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/13/) — A bee has four wings, but in flight the front and back wing on each side hook together, so it looks like two. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/14/) — True flies, like houseflies, hoverflies and mosquitoes, have only two wings; their back pair has shrunk into tiny knobs called halteres. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/15/) — A woodlouse has 14 legs and is a crustacean, related to crabs; a crab has ten legs counting its claws, which is why it is called a decapod. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/40-counting-legs-arms-wings-and-tails/16/) — Monkeys have tails, but apes, including gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans and humans, do not; we keep only a small tailbone. - ← previous: [Octopuses, squid and cuttlefish](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/39-octopuses-squid-and-cuttlefish/) - next →: [Counting animals: eyes, ears, hearts, trunks, tentacles, teeth](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/41-counting-animals/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)