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A male whale shark at the Georgia Aquarium.

The Marine Life Portal

Killer whales (orcas) are highly visible marine apex predators that hunt many large species. But most biological activity in the ocean takes place with microscopic marine organisms that cannot be seen individually with the naked eye, such as marine bacteria and phytoplankton.

Marine life, sea life, or ocean life is the plants, animals, and other organisms that live in the salt water of seas or oceans, or the brackish water of coastal estuaries. At a fundamental level, marine life affects the nature of the planet. Marine organisms, mostly microorganisms, produce oxygen and sequester carbon. Marine life, in part, shape and protect shorelines, and some marine organisms even help create new land (e.g. coral building reefs).

Marine invertebrates exhibit a wide range of modifications to survive in poorly oxygenated waters, including breathing tubes as in mollusc siphons. Fish have gills instead of lungs, although some species of fish, such as the lungfish, have both. Marine mammals (e.g. dolphins, whales, otters, and seals) need to surface periodically to breathe air. (Full article...)


Marine biology is the scientific study of the biology of marine life, organisms in the sea. Given that in biology many phyla, families and genera have some species that live in the sea and others that live on land, marine biology classifies species based on the environment rather than on taxonomy. (Full article...)

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An example of a marine worm, the Parborlasia corrugatus lives at depths of up to 4,000 metres.
Any worm that lives in a marine environment is considered a water worm. Marine worms are found in several different phyla, including the Platyhelminthes, Nematoda, Annelida (segmented worms), Chaetognatha, Hemichordata, and Phoronida. For a list of marine animals that have been called "sea worms", see sea worm. (Full article...)
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  • ... Some sharks are so flexible, they can bend right around and touch their tails with their snouts.
  • ... the Orca, is the fastest swimmer of all the cetaceans and can reach speeds of more than 50km/h while hunting.
  • ... the Humpback Whales song is produced by them forcing air through their massive nasal cavities
  • ... the Beluga whale is also known as the Sea Canary on account of its high-pitched squeaks, squeals, and whistles.
  • ... on average, a whale or dolphin will eat four to five percent of its body weight in food per day. That means that a 100 ton blue whale will eat almost five tons of krill per day, or that a 200kg bottlenose dolphin will eat 10kg of fish per day!
  • ... in spite of their enormous mass, baleen whales are capable of leaping completely out of the water, particularly the Humpback Whale.

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Photo credit: Jens Petersen

Schooling bigeye trevally. In biology, any group of fish that stay together for social reasons are said to be shoaling and if the group is swimming in the same direction in a coordinated manner, they are said to be schooling.

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