The vaquita is the world's rarest sea mammal and one of the most endangered animals in the world. Their name means 'little cow' in Spanish, and they are a unique species of porpoise, with a small, chunky body and a round head.
Vaquita, the world's rarest marine mammal, is on the edge of extinction. The plight of cetaceans—whales, dolphins, and porpoises—as a whole is exemplified by the rapid decline of the vaquita in Mexico, with about 10 individuals remaining.
Researchers around the world continue to study marine life and habitats to help develop new strategies to preserve vital ocean ecosystems. Scientists estimate that 91 percent of ocean species have yet to be classified, and that more than eighty percent of our ocean is unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored..
Starfish, also known as Sea Stars, are one of the most beautiful looking animals in the vast ocean. They have a surprisingly unusual anatomy, with no brain or blood, yet are able to digest food outside their body.
The finding, published in Science, suggests that a reservoir of water is hidden in the Earth's mantle, more than 400 miles below the surface. Try to refrain from imagining expanses of underground seas: all this water, three times the volume of water on the surface, is trapped inside rocks.
While the blue whale is the overall-largest creature of the sea, the lion's mane jellyfish goes to the top of the list for being the longest. These languid beauties have tentacles that reach an astonishing 120 feet in length.
The dominant species are crustaceans, fish and a variety of animals with soft and jelly-like bodies such as jellyfish. The deep-sea floor is covered with many mounds and depressions formed by benthic animals such as worms, mollusks, crustaceans, starfish, brittlestars, shrimps, fishes sea cucumbers and sea urchins.
The deep sea is largely unexplored by humanity, which means that are plenty of undiscovered creatures swimming around in the ocean. Of those that we have discovered, though, they can be rather bizarre and creepy. Perhaps it is a product of their environment so far beneath the surface without sunlight.
The rarest animal in the world is the vaquita (Phocoena sinus). It is a kind of critically endangered porpoise that only lives in the furthest north-western corner of the Gulf of California in Mexico. There are only 18 left in the world.
Scientists today formally documented the world's newest, deepest fish, Pseudoliparis swirei, an odd little snailfish caught at 7,966 meters in the Mariana Trench—nearly twice as far below the sea's surface as Wyoming's Grand Teton towers above it.
The fossil belongs to a new species named Cymbospondylus youngorum that is estimated to have lived some 246 million years ago, making it the largest fossil from that era ever found. The specimen offers new insights into what ocean was like millions of years ago and how ichthyosaurs grew to be so large.
Hundreds of years ago, European sailors told of a sea monster called the kraken that could toss ships into the air with its many long arms. Today we know sea monsters aren't real--but a living sea animal, the giant squid, has 10 arms and can grow longer than a school bus.
Light may be detected as far as 1,000 meters down in the ocean, but there is rarely any significant light beyond 200 meters. The ocean is divided into three zones based on depth and light level. Although some sea creatures depend on light to live, others can do without it.
There have been many purported sightings of lake monsters, and even some photographs, but each time these have either been shown to be deliberate deceptions, such as the Lake George Monster Hoax, or serious doubts about the veracity and verifiability have arisen, as with the famous Mansi photograph of Champ.
The ocean floor is called the abyssal plain. Below the ocean floor, there are a few small deeper areas called ocean trenches. Features rising up from the ocean floor include seamounts, volcanic islands and the mid-oceanic ridges and rises.
The Pacific is the oldest of the existing ocean basins. Its oldest rocks have been dated at about 200 million years.
The simple answer is no. The whole world will never be underwater. But our coastlines would be very different. If all the ice covering Antarctica , Greenland, and in mountain glaciers around the world were to melt, sea level would rise about 70 meters (230 feet).
Share: Far bigger than any dinosaur, the blue whale is the largest known animal to have ever lived. An adult blue whale can grow to a massive 30m long and weigh more than 180,000kg - that's about the same as 40 elephants, 30 Tyrannosaurus Rex or 2,670 average-sized men.