Whiskers

Inside your small intestine, nutrients pass through the intestine’s walls straight into your blood, which delivers them everywhere — muscles, brain, bones. Anything your body cannot use keeps travelling onward. Speedy Whiskers rows right past this hand-over every day, watching lunch turn into zoom-around energy.

Villi (say it: VIL-eye) are millions of tiny finger-shaped bumps covering the inside of your small intestine, like a super-soft towel. They give your intestine a HUGE surface for soaking up nutrients — flattened out, it would cover a badminton court! To Whiskers it is one giant fuzzy racetrack.

Chewing is digestion step one! Smaller pieces are easier for your stomach to churn and give your digestive juices more surface to work on, so your body collects nutrients faster and your tummy feels comfier. Even Whiskers, the fastest swimmer around, says: slow down for chewing.

Whiskers is a PeekaLab creature inspired by a paramecium — the fuzzy "slipper animal" every kid meets under a school microscope. Covered in thousands of tiny swimming hairs and always in a hurry — the fastest thing under the microscope.

Whiskers lives near the Small Intestine. Real paramecia row themselves along with up to 10,000 beating hairs called cilia — like a boat with ten thousand oars!

Open PeekaLab and move your cursor over the scan area. When you get close, Whiskers will glow and reveal itself. Look for faint pulsing rings — that's a clue something is hiding there!

Whiskers is a fun character inspired by real biology! The creature design and organ facts are based on real microorganisms and anatomy, but Whiskers itself is a fictional, friendly version for kids to enjoy.