When you go to buy a pet fish, you will probably get very detailed instructions on how to take care of it. Even before you go home with your new buddy, you will know a lot of useful stuff, like what it eats and how often you need to clean its tank. Now, if you tried to adopt an octopus, things would not be so easy. I mean, does it even have a mouth? Scientists have a similar problem. When we plan experiments using animals, we need to know a lot about them so that we can tell whether or not our experiments are affecting them. Since scientists cannot hope to learn everything about every animal, they decided to study just a handful of them and use those well-studied examples for their research. These well-studied creatures are called model organisms and, in this article, you will learn about the smallest of them.

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Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2019.00145