Ocean life
Science
19 rabbit holes · 9 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Do octopus arms have brains?
- How do you figure out the age of a shark?
- Where do eels breed?
- Why are deep sea animals so big?
Rabbit holes
- 28,000 rubber ducks fell into the Pacific and taught us about ocean currents
A container of bath toys went overboard in 1992. Oceanographers tracked them for years as they washed up in Alaska, Hawaii, South America, and supposedly some made it into the Atlantic.
Inês Carvalho · 5 sources
- The jellyfish that can reverse its own life cycle
When stressed it turns back into a polyp and starts over. Not immortal in the 'can't die' sense, it still gets eaten constantly, but still.
Priya Natarajan · 5 sources
- only a handful of people have been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench
Desmond Achebe · 5 sources
- whale falls: when a whale dies, an ecosystem starts
A single whale carcass can feed a deep-sea community for decades. First scavengers, then bone worms, then bacteria living off the sulfides in the bones.
Priya Natarajan · 5 sources
- Coral can sense the moon
Mass spawning on the Great Barrier Reef happens a few nights after a full moon in late spring, and corals seem to time it with light-sensitive proteins that detect moonlight.
Aroha Williams · 4 sources
- Venice's flood barriers
78 hollow gates lying on the seabed that fill with air and rise to close the lagoon during high tides. Decades late and billions over budget, but it has worked since 2020.
Inês Carvalho · 4 sources
- mantis shrimp see more colors than us? turns out no
Priya Natarajan · 5 sources
- an octopus does most of its thinking in its arms
Grace Whitfield · 6 sources
- Sharks are older than trees
Grace Whitfield · 4 sources
- Greenland sharks were aged using the lenses of their eyes
Nils Eriksson · 5 sources
- Someone stuck a heart monitor on a blue whale
A 2019 study suction-cupped a sensor onto a blue whale. During dives its heart rate dropped to around 2 beats per minute, near what researchers think is the limit for a heart that size.
Inês Carvalho · 4 sources
- We've mapped Mars better than our own ocean floor
Only roughly a quarter of the seafloor has been mapped at high resolution. Most of what you see on Google Earth is estimated from satellite measurements of the sea surface.
Nikolai Volkov · 5 sources
- nobody has ever seen eels mate (and Freud tried)
Every European eel is born somewhere in the Sargasso Sea and swims thousands of km to rivers in Europe, then back to spawn and die. We have never directly observed them spawning in the wild.
Inês Carvalho · 6 sources
- hagfish slimed an entire highway in Oregon
In 2017 a truck carrying hagfish flipped on Highway 101 and the fish slimed the road and a car. A hagfish can turn a bucket of water into slime in seconds.
Yuki Tanabe · 3 sources
- the great pacific garbage patch isn't an island of trash
It's more like a thin soup of mostly small plastic spread over a huge area, plus a surprising amount of fishing gear. Which makes it harder to clean up, not easier.
Moira Gallagher · 5 sources
- why everything in the deep sea is enormous
Nils Eriksson · 5 sources
- glowing seas you can see from space
Sailors described the sea glowing white to the horizon for centuries and nobody believed them. Then satellites caught an area the size of Connecticut glowing in 1995.
Moira Gallagher · 5 sources
- sea otters protect kelp forests by eating urchins
Priya Natarajan · 5 sources
- The Bloop wasn't a sea monster
Inês Carvalho · 5 sources