But, believe it or not, all of these animals can be found right here on planet Earth! Check out these 9 sea creatures who are out of this world! They like shallow water, but they can sometimes be found on ocean floors up to 9 km below the surface of the water! The glaucus atlanticus , aka. They actually float upside down on the waves: their blue bellies face up to match the surface, and their silver backs face down to blend in with light shining down.
Their glowing green backs, red legs, bulging eyes, and long antennas certainly make the mantis shrimp one of the most alien-looking creatures on the planet! Scotoplanes globosa sheltering a crab. Unlike the crunchy and delicious green vegetable, this sea cucumber lives in the dark at the bottom of the ocean. They are very fast swimmers and have multiple tentacles or arms that they use to catch and eat their food.
These animals are meat-eaters and many of them use poison to kill their prey. Cuttlefish, octopi, and squid all have eight long arms. Here are some videos of cuttlefish as well. Giant Squid — some squid are small, but the giant squid, as its name tells us, is not a small one.
This large creature can reach over 40 feet long and weigh about 1 ton 2, pounds , making it one of the largest ocean dwellers! Its main predator an animal that hunts and eats it is the sperm whale.
A sperm whale might have to fight hard if it wants a giant squid for a meal though, because they are generally not much longer than the giant squid! Like other squid, the giant squid has eight arms and two very long tentacles with sharp barbs at the ends, which it uses to capture food. It likes to eat smaller squid and fish.
Giant squid live very far down in the ocean and have big eyes to help them see. Print this two-page coloring sheet and help kids cut and paste each animal onto the ocean page at the depth where it is most commonly found in the ocean. Talk about why each animal lives in that particular area.
Encourage them to draw animals and plants to fill their ocean picture. Add 1 tablespoon of salt to the water in one container and stir it until the salt dissolves.
Do not add anything to the other container. Once they have both started to freeze, you can take them out and taste some of the chunks of ice. Can you tell which one had salt added to it just by tasting?
Put the containers back in the freezer and check on them every hour. Did it take longer for one to freeze completely solid? Which one do you think will thaw the fastest? Set both cups on the counter and check them every few minutes to find out! The water in the container that you added salt to probably took longer to freeze than the plain water. Water freezes at a certain temperature — 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
This temperature is called the freezing point of water, because pure water will always begin to freeze when it gets to 32 degrees. Salt is a mineral that lowers the freezing point of water. That means that when you added salt to the water, it lowered the freezing point of the water in the containers, so it did not start to freeze until it got really, really cold from being in the freezer for a long time.
The salt water was probably sort of slushy still by the time the plain water was frozen solid. The ice from the cup without salt took much longer to thaw completely back into water than the cup with salt in it for the same reason. The freezing point of the salt water is still colder and now that it is out in the warmer air of the room, it is much farther from being as cold as it needs to be to continue to freeze into ice.
It also thawed sooner than the plain water because there was less ice to melt since the salt water did not freeze all the way through. The ocean can never freeze because there is so much salt in the water that the freezing point is very low.
Any time a part of the ocean gets cold enough to start forming ice crystals, the salt around the ice will start to melt it by lowering the freezing point again so that it has to get colder to keep freezing.
This is very important because many ocean animals would not survive if the water were to freeze! For a fun and tasty experiment to see what happens when you mix ice and salt, try making ice cream in a plastic bag!
If you could be an ocean animal for a day, what would you want to be? Pick one you like or want to learn more about, then draw a picture of it. You can pretend to be that animal while you answer these questions:. Home Science Tools offers a wide variety of biology products and kits. Erica Saint Clair explains how these five cool summer projects incorporate entertaining, hands-on science.
To get started with our leaf chromatography experiment, we first must learn about leaves. Leaves contain different pigments, which give them their color.
Green chlorophyll is the most common type of pigment, but there are also carotenoids yellow, orange and Now what? Make it the best summer yet with these 50 simple science projects to do at home. Ever wonder what to do with that left over pumpkin from Halloween or the pumpkin you bought for decorative purposes?
How about turning it into a science project? The earliest fossil specimen, a skull, was dated to about million years ago. It was unearthed in South Africa in the s. Native to the northeast Pacific Ocean near California and Baja California, the sarcastic fringehead is a kind of tube blenny , a type of small fish that burrows in tube-like structures created by other creatures.
Sarcastic fringeheads primarily gorge on squid eggs, but scientists believe that the males' oversized mouths may impede upon their ability to feed. The barreleye was first described in , but remained a mystery to scientists until , when they discovered that its large, tubular eyes could actually rotate inside of its head. This rotational ability allows them to look upward for potential prey or face forward to see what it is eating.
Since barreleyes live at such depths where there is hardly any light, their tubular eyes help them use whatever faint amounts of light drift down to them. They also have two spots above their mouths which are called nares, analogous to human nostrils.
Almost four years ago, Australian researchers found a faceless cusk an incredible 13, feet below the water's surface. Expedition leader Dr. Apparently its mouth sits underneath the rest of its body, and is " protrusible ," meaning it extends to catch food, and then disappears back inside of its own body. Oceanographers aboard the HMS Challenger collected the first specimen of the species in , which was the last time one was ever seen.
Named the "world's ugliest animal" in an online poll conducted by a British organization called the Ugly Animal Preservation Society, the blobfish belongs to the fathead sculpin family — a group of fish that dwells in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans at depths ranging from to 9, feet.
While most fish stay buoyant with the aid of a swim bladder , blobfish — whose bodies are less dense than water — utilize the ocean itself as a floating mechanism. The most famous blobfish , Mr. Blobby, was discovered in off the coast of New Zealand and has inspired everything from plush toys to emoji.
Preserved in ethyl alcohol, Mr. Blobby's final resting place is at the Australian Museum in Sydney. This toothy fella is found at depths of more than 3, feet , and has been spotted in Africa between Morocco and Gabon and in Europe between Northern Ireland and the Mediterranean Sea.
Deepsea lizardfish — whose sharp teeth and large mouths come in handy for catching prey on the ocean floor — can grow to be more than two feet long.
These bioluminescent sea creatures create their own light in the darkness. Big fish swim through these waters too, such as great white sharks , manta rays, and ocean sunfish. The largest animal ever to live on Earth is an ocean mammal called the blue whale.
Dolphins , porpoises, and sea lions are also ocean-dwelling mammals. The ocean teems with plant life. Most are tiny algae called phytoplankton—and these microscopic plants have a big job. Through photosynthesis, they produce about half of the oxygen that humans and other land-dwelling creatures breathe.
Bigger algae like seaweed and kelp also grow in the ocean and provide food and shelter for marine animals. Temperature, ocean depth, and distance from the shore determine the types of plants and animals living in an area of the ocean. These regions are called habitats. Coral reefs are one type of habitat. When tiny animals called polyps die, their skeletons harden so other polyps can live on top of them.
Then those polyps die, and more move in. After thousands of years, this becomes a complex structure called a coral reef that provides food and shelter for many kinds of ocean animals. In fact, corals reefs have been called the rainforests of the sea because of the wide variety of animals found there. Animals such as seahorses , clownfish , and sea turtles all live on coral reefs. And corals themselves are animals!
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