Search Results

A longshoreman stands in front of a large pile of oyster shells on waterfront pier in Atlantic City in 1910. Back then, oysters were incredibly abundant. In the late 1800s, fishermen pulled in 10 million bushels of oysters each year but, by the mid-1900s, the catch had dropped to 1 or 2 million bushels each year because of disease and overharvesting.

A mangrove tree crab (Aratus pisonii) clings to a leaf near the Smithsonian Institution’s marine laboratory on Galeta Island, Panama, part of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

An emperor penguin chick (Aptenodytes forsteri) huddles under its mother's legs to keep warm in the long Antarctic winter. Learn more about research on emperor penguins and other Antarctic creatures.

Sperm whales have conical teeth on their long, narrow, lower jaw. The teeth fit neatly into sockets in the upper jaw, which has no teeth. This arrangement is a perfect adaptation for slurping up soft-bodied squids—giant or otherwise. The sperm whale is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species.

Alien-looking creatures like this deep-red jellyfish (Crossota norvegica) swim in the Arctic Sea. Learn more about Arctic sea life in our Under the Arctic Ice story, or at the home page for the Arctic Ocean Diversity project. And learn more about jellyfish!

Another common species of sargassum shrimp, Leander tenuicornis (Palaemonidae), can be spotted by its long transparent claws or "chelae". Very similar shrimp are found in near shore habitats all around the world. Using genetic tests we may determine if they are the same species, or two different species that look the same.

Welcome to the Ocean Portal. We focus on everything ocean – unusual and everyday organisms, ocean-inspired art, researchers devoting their lives to exploring the still mostly mysterious ecosystem. We here at the Ocean Portal learn something new everyday and we want to share it with you! 

Coral reefs are the most diverse of all marine ecosystems. They teem with life, with perhaps one quarter of all ocean species depending on reefs for food and shelter. This is a remarkable statistic when you consider that reefs cover just a tiny fraction (less than one percent) of the earth’s surface and less than two percent of the ocean bottom. Because they are so diverse, coral reefs are often called the rainforests of the sea.

Imagine an adult person – now triple that size. That’s the size of the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias). The biggest great white sharks can reach up to 20 feet long, but most are smaller. The average female is 15-16 feet long, while males reach 11-13 feet. More about the great white shark can be found in our great white shark overview.

Can you spot the amphipod (Phronima atlantica) in the below photo? She's the transparent lobster-looking animal in the middle, surrounded by her own eggs -- inside a sac that once was the "barrel" of a salp. Mothers in the genus Phromina attack the barrel-shaped salps, hollowing out the inside of their sac body before laying their eggs inside.

This close-up view of salps, which have aggregated together into a long chain, have brilliant red guts from eating red plankton. They were observed by researchers with the Census of Marine Zooplankton in the Sargasso Sea.

During the decade of the Census of Marine Life, more than 6,000 potential new ocean species were discovered by 2,700 participating scientists from more than 80 countries. Census scientists searched the global ocean to learn more about species as large as the blue whale and as small as a zooplankter or microbe. They sampled from the world's coldest regions -- from the Arctic and Antarctic to the warm Tropics, from deep sea hydrothermal vents to coastal ecosystems.