With over 72% of the Earth’s surface covered by salt water, the Earth’s oceans are home to 230,000 known species. And that’s with only 5% of the Earth’s oceans considered explored!
Jellyfish have been around for more than 650 million years, which means that they outdate both dinosaurs and sharks.
An Electric Eel is known to produce electricity sufficient enough to light up to 10 electric bulbs.
The electric eel generates large electric currents of a highly specialized nervous system that has the capacity to synchronize the activity of disc-shaped, electricity-producing cells packed into a specialized electric organ. The nervous system does this through a command nucleus that decides when the electric organ will fire.
Dolphins sleep with only half of their brain and with one eye open so they can watch for predators and other threats.
For humans and other land mammals, sleep involves partial or total unconsciousness, But the same thing isn’t true for dolphins and other cetaceans, the group of marine mammals that includes whales, orcas and porpoises. Instead, these animals undergo an unusual form of sleep called “unihemispheric slow-wave sleep.”
An Octopus has three hearts and the color of its blood is blue.
At 188 decibels, the calls of blue whales is the loudest sound made by any animal on the planet.
Oysters can change from one gender to another and back again depending on which is best for mating.
Unlike other animals, this creature has no need for a mate. It has all the sexual equipment it needs right under its shell. The oyster is male in youth and female for the later part of its life. Oysters usually spend their first spawning season as males and then change radically. Testes become ovaries and for the rest of their life they are egg-making machines. The smaller oysters are usually male and the larger ones female.
Seahorses are the only animals in which the male, not the female, gives birth and care for their young.
Seahorses and their close relatives the pipefish and the seadragons are very unusual, because it is the males that get pregnant and give birth to the babies. Instead of growing the baby seahorses inside their belly in a uterus, like human mums do, the seahorse dads will carry the babies in a pouch, a bit like a kangaroo’s pouch. To produce babies, seahorses have to mate first. Males and females dance around one another and flutter their fins, and they may dance together over several days before they actually mate.
A shrimp’s heart is in their head.
Sea sponges have no head, mouth, eyes, feelers, bones, heart, lungs, or brain, yet they are alive.
Turtles live on every continent except Antarctica
While most turtles don’t tolerate the cold well, the Blanding’s turtle has been observed swimming under the ice in the Great Lakes region.
Many fish are sequential hermaphrodites which are born as females and become male later on.
Clownfish are all male except the largest one which becomes a female.
Parrot fish produce 85% of the sand that builds up reef islands like in the Maledives.
Parrotfish chew on coral all day, eating not only the hard calcium carbonate skeleton, but the soft-bodied organisms that live inside them and provide the coral with energy, as well as bacteria living inside the coral skeleton. When parrotfish poop out the coral they eat, the soft tissues are absorbed and what remains comes out as sand-a lot of sand.
Moray eels are not aggressive when they open and close their mouth, they are actually just breathing.
Whales make the loudest sounds underwater with 188 dBs, the whistle can travel up to 500 miles.
The blue whale is not the loudest animal on Earth, despite what you may have learned in school. While its calls are claimed to be louder than a jet engine at take-off, clocking in at an impressive 188 decibels (dB), the sperm whale is actually louder: its communicative clicks have been measured at 230 dB. Looked at side by side, the numbers seem pretty conclusive, but decibels, which measure sound pressure, are not the only way to measure loudness.
Frogfish do not have teeth and therefore have to swallow their prey whole.
It swallows its prey in one piece. It can swallow the prey that is 2 times bigger than the fish itself thanks to ability to expand the mouth 12 times its normal size.
