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This awesome photo is of a newly discovered deep sea worm, Swima fulgida. Measuring just over an inch long, this little guy lives 9,000 feet underwater and escapes predators by flinging homemade "bombs" at its enemies. More »
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Russian photographer Alexander Semenov creates photographs of marine life that just burst with color and energy. You may have understood, on some intellectual level, that the ocean depths are an ecosystem, teeming with life and all connected. But looking at these stunning photos will make you see it in a new way. More »
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Hydrothermal vents are epicenters to some of the most extreme geochemical processes on the planet. The hot spots of geological activity make their home on the ocean floor, where jets of scalding hot, mineral-rich water spew forth into the depths of the near-freezing ocean. More »
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Antarctica is the coldest, most desolate place on Earth, and the Southern Ocean that surrounds it is much the same...with one pretty massive exception. The hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor are hot, dark oases, full of previously unknown species. More »
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Many bacteria found at the bottom of the ocean glow in the dark thanks to light generated by their internal chemical reactions. This makes it easier for fish to see and eat them — which is exactly what the bacteria want. More »
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As sea temperatures rise, many fish species will have to relocate to find waters that can support them. But they won't have a lot of time to look for the right new home. For fish, it's survival of the fastest. More »
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After a dead whale falls to the bottom of the ocean, thousands of marine organisms will carve out a home in its carcass. Among these corpse squatters are the Osedax, a genus of marine worms that bores into whales' bones and feed on the delicious cetacean fats inside. More »
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This is a video of several xenophyophores, four-inch-long single-celled organisms that have been discovered 6.6 miles under the sea in the Mariana Trench. More »
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When a whale kicks the bucket, all that blubber has to go somewhere. This absolutely gorgeous short film by Sharon Shattuck and Flora Lichtman depicts what happens to a whale's corpse after it falls to the bottom of the sea. See all of your favorite deep-sea scavengers in puppet form! I mean you, polychaete worm! More »
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For decades, paleontologists have puzzled over a fossil collection of nine Triassic icthyosaurs (Shonisaurus popularis) discovered in Nevada's Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. Researchers initially thought that this strange grouping of 45-foot-long marine reptiles had either died en masse from a poisonous plankton bloom or had become stranded in shallow water. More »
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Some unknown terrible person shot a defenseless pilot whale last month, leaving it to swim the Atlantic in agony for weeks before it finally beached itself on the New Jersey shore and died. Authorities are still looking for the shooter. The bullet wound caused a fulminant infection in the whale's jaw that prevented it from eating, so it basically starved to death. This was determined during a necropsy, an autopsy for animals. More »
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Until today, little was known of the mating practices of deep sea squids. Most of them live more than 400 meters beneath the ocean's surface, making it very difficult for humans to observe their behavior in the crushing darkness. But now, with the help of robot submersibles, researchers have discovered that the deep sea squid Octopoteuthis deletron is a promiscuous bisexual creature. Males of the species implant their sperm into males just as often as they do females. And there's photographic evidence. More »
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What happens when a group of hungry sharks discover a meaty hunk of whale carcass ripening in the sun? They chow down on it like a floating, all-you can-eat buffet. More »
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These fish are native to the limestone caverns found deep beneath the Somalian desert. As you might imagine, these are creatures of eternal darkness, and thus the terms "night" and "day" are meaningless. And that's what makes their biological clocks so bizarre. More »
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Male fiddler crabs have a single giant claw that looks like the evolutionary equivalent of going through a mid-life crisis and buying a super expensive sports car. The truth, it turns out, is only slightly less ridiculous than that. More »
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While filming whales off of the Canary Islands recently, a documentary crew discovered a rare marine find — the body of an Architheuthis squid bobbing in open water. Sadly, the creature was extremely dead, but the documentarians were able to capture footage of this deceased beast. More »
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In order to clear any doubts regarding the comparative growth rates of the whiskers of harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) and Steller sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus), researchers at the Institute of Marine Science, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the Mystic Aquarium, CT, U.S.A. performed a series of experiments in 2001. The whiskers of participant seals and sea lions were stable-isotope-labeled with Carbon 13 and Nitrogen 15, and whisker growth rates were measured over a period of  more than two years. More »
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Plankton are tiny all by their lonesome, but every summer these tiny marine organisms take over the Barents Sea north of Norway. On August 14, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA's Aqua satellite captured this giant bloom stretching several hundred kilometers over the Scandinavian Peninsula. More »
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The algae is in full bloom off of the Chinese city of Qingdao, creating a giant greet splotch measuring as much as 70 meters by 100 meters. As you can see, it takes more than that to deter Qingdao beach-goers. More »
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Personality might seem like it's something you can only have if you've got complex, human-like intelligence, but that isn't necessarily the case. In fact, the brainless sea creature Actinia equina reveal distinct personalities in how they respond to threats. More »
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This blackspot tuskfish, found in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, held a clam in its mouth and smashed it against a rock to reach the food inside. This photo is the first incontrovertible proof that fish are capable of tool use. More »
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In the shallow waters of the ocean, hiding between the individual grains of sand, live flatworms known as Paracatenula. With neither a stomach nor internal organs, they survive using through a symbiosis with bacteria — in a relationship older than any ever found before. To gain energy, the worms essentially need the bacteria to feed them. The bacteria oxidizes sulfur compounds in the waters around the worms, in a food-sharing relationship generally found only among the rugged life that's rooted in deep sea vents. More »
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No animal is more defined by what it eats than the cleaner fish. These helpful parasites are all born female, but the biggest eater becomes the dominant male...and then, as you might expect, institutes a strict diet for everyone else. More »
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Generally speaking, poop isn't pleasant, but it also isn't exactly lethal. But every year jellyfish unleash bowel movements so deadly that they can destroy entire marine ecosystems. A little odor doesn't seem so bad all of a sudden, does it? More »
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It's like the ocean has turned into something out a bad 50s biker movie - gangs of young bottlenose dolphins are roaming the seas, taking out their sexual frustrations by randomly killing any porpoises that get in their way. More »
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What links a scientific research station in Antarctica with a unique opera performance in Germany's capital? More »
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When a pair of freshwater fish species reproduce together, they create hybrids who are able to reproduce asexually. This ability should offer the hybrids an unstoppable evolutionary advantage...so why aren't we bowing down before our asexual fish hybrid masters? More »
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Sea squirts might not look like much...they're simple, hermaphroditic creatures that barely even have a brain. But they have a particular knack for activating the enzyme telomerase, which protects DNA from degradation. That unexpected talent could help fight human aging. More »
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The haunting songs produced by whales are shockingly similar to human pop music: one single hit tune spreads across the ocean, and becomes the preferred whale mating tune. And, just like the modern music industry, it all runs on remixes. More »
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If you're ever out in the open ocean and you see a hungry great white shark headed your way, you'd better hope that shark is a teenager. Younger great whites lack the jaw strength necessary to bite humans to death. More »
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Covering 30% of Earth's surface and totaling 622 million cubic kilometers, the Pacific Ocean still holds countless secrets. But even so, oceanographers weren't expecting to find this - supposedly extinct elkhorn coral, spotted for the first time since the 1890s. More »
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Improving human mental health is having some serious unintended consequences for our friends in the ocean. Exposure to antidepressants makes shrimp five times more likely to place themselves in life-threatening situations, and the broader effects could damage the entire ecosystem. More »
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Millennium Atoll, the easternmost island of the Pacific nation Kiribati, is a rare pristine example of the coral reef ecosystem. Isolated from human disruption for centuries, the atoll is full of life as it would be without humans. More »
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Steve O'Shea already holds a world record for rearing squid in a controlled environment. But everybody's got a dream, and O'Shea's is to do the same thing one day with the famously elusive giant squid. More »
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Dolphins are intelligent enough to warrant rights as "non-human persons," according to a team of marine biologists. This view is based on wide-ranging analysis of dolphin behavior, social interaction, and anatomy. More »
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The future of marine travel may look a little more... wiggly than we thought, thanks to the efforts of a German robotics lab. The group has designed a fish robot, based on a sea bream and programmed to mimic fish swimming patterns. More »
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If you've ever seen the original Godzilla movie from 1954, you know that the heroic scientists deploy a weapon called the "oxygen destroyer" (pictured) that sucks all oxygen from the water and suffocates the Big G. Now it turns out that weapon isn't as ridiculous as you thought: In fact, scientists have identified countless "oxygen dead zones" in the oceans created rapidly by chemicals and plants that suck air out of the water. Once oxygen has been leeched from the water — usually close to shore — any ocean life larger than microbes is a goner. More »
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In our quest to discover alien life forms, humans have looked deep into space, sent landers to Mars. and launched probes into the outer reaches of the solar system. But marine biologists discover new life forms here on Earth all the time, many of them truly bizarre and as alien to terrestrial life as anything you'll find in a scifi movie. That's why the Census of Marine Life is undertaking an amazing long-term project to catalog every single one of them and eventually make the information accessible to all of us. More »
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It's a popular defensive strategy at the bottom of the ocean: If you're scared, just clone yourself. The process will make you smaller and harder to find, as well as doubling the chance that your genes will survive. Sand dollar larvae are rampant self-cloners, but they only do it when they sense danger. That means there's a kind of conscious intent behind their cloning — it's not just an ordinary part of their reproductive cycle. How easy would it be to port this trait to humans, so we could just pop out a new self when the old one is about to be offed? More »
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