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a diagram of heat flow in a turtle's flipper
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Counter-current Heat Exchange

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A screenshot of a map with links to stories on the side.
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Smithsonian Ocean Optimism Around the World

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An Atlantic puffin with small fish in its beak.
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Atlantic Puffin

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Unlike the green, leafy algae we're used to seeing, coralline algae has a hard crust—which you can see here at the molecular level under a scanning electron microscope.
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Coralline Algae Under the Microscope

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A female manatee and her calf are captured on film foraging in seagrass off the coast of Brazil.
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Female Manatee Foraging with a Calf on Her Back

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The Gulf of Mexico shrimp trawl fishery scoops up a lot of unwanted fish along with the shrimp. In the 1990s, for every pound of shrimp caught, more than 4 pounds of other fish species were caught as bycatch and discarded dead.
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Shrimp Trawls Catch More Than Shrimp

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How well could you eat with a saw on your face? If you were a sawshark, you couldn’t eat without one! Sawsharks are named for their long snouts, which have sharp teeth protruding from either side. They attack their prey by slashing these “saws” from
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Sawshark

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These zooplankton collected on a research cruise include a jellyfish, a lanternfish, a snipe eel, two large orange shrimp, a fuzzy pyrosome (which is bioluminescent), and several smaller animals.
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Counting the Ocean's Diversity

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The fringed baleen plates are easy to observe as this North Atlantic right whale skims the water’s surface while it feeds.
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Baleen in Action

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Nick Pyenson points to a skull and skeleton of a fossil whale.
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An Ancient Whale Skeleton, Unexcavated

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Dr. Valerie Paul, director of the Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce, Fla., examines tropical seaweeds on northwestern Guam’s coral reefs.
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Diving in Guam

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Sargassum forms dense clumps up to the size of a beach ball that slowly rotate as they drift.
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Floating Sargassum Seaweed

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