How animals and plants survive in the desert

Deserts are the driest places on Earth!In deserts, there's so little rain that sometimes you have to wait a whole year just for one rain storm!So things that live in the desert, like plants and animals and even people,need special ways to survive when there're so little water.
They also need special ways to deal with the temperature in the deserts.Because deserts aren't just very dry. They can also be very hot or very cold.Hot deserts are the kinds of deserts you might have heard about before.They're incredibly hot-just like as hot as the middle of the summer, all year!Though they can also get pretty chilly at night.Hot deserts don't have a lot of big leafy plants that can help provide shade during the day,or anything to hold in heat at night like a blanket.But not all deserts are hot. There are actually cold deserts, too!During the summer, cold deserts aren't too cold, but when it gets to winter, they're freezing!When you think of the cold, you might think of snow.But it hardly ever snows in cold deserts, even though it so cold.There might only be a tiny bit of snow or rain all year.Whether their desert is hot or cold,all the plants and animals that live in deserts have to be really well prepared to live in such an extreme place.One of the main things that's hard about life in the desert is that there's so little water.Some of them have special ways to hold on to whatever water they can find.Like a cactus! Cactuses are plants that live in deserts,and they have thick stems where they can store water for a long time.It's almost like they have a water bottle built into their bodies!So even though it doesn't rain very much,
whenever it does rain, a cactus will soak up lots of water and save it,so it has water until the next time it rains.But that's not the only way to get water when it hardly ever rains.