My name is Henry.
I'm an eleven year old English cocker spaniel who lives in London with my daddy.
This time our adventures are taking us from rockpools to the deepest darkest point of the ocean.
Come and join us as we discover all the amazing sea creatures and marine life on our amazing planet.
Well let's start by talking about how BIG the ocean is... do you have any idea ?
Have you ever stood on a beach and looked out? At the blue sea.
All that blue. As far as you can see!
Have you ever thought where does it stop? How big is it ?
First thing to think about is there is actually only ONE connected HUGE ocean. Different parts of the ocean were given different names to originally help sailors navigate and identify where they were. They are all different depths and temperatures.
If you look at the map of the world, it is divided into five ocean basins Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic, Indian and Southern Oceans
The first ocean to be named was the Atlanticover 2700 years ago - but that was originally just the area around the Atlas Mountains.
It wasn't until the year 1600 that it was applied to the entire ocean we now know.
The Pacific ocean was originally called Mar Pacifico (which is portuguese for quiet sea) over 500 yrs ago.
The Southern Ocean was only called that in the year 2000 - before that it was known as the Antarctic Ocean.
If you look at the Earth from space it's very very blue
In fact the oceans cover almost 75% of the earth...
...that's means three quarters of the planet is water!
That's 139,000,000 square miles ! I and about 36 United States of America !
Let's look at it another way.
There's soooo much water - if you look at how deep it is and how much there is then it is equal to 332 million cubic miles.
That's such a big figure it's hard to explain ... so how about this
Imagine the whole of the United States was covered in this water.
The country would be under a mass of water over 82 miles deep
That's 656 Empire State Buildings deep!
Let's go back a step. Where did it all begin!?
Well life began under the water before it started on land! There are fossils that tell us life existed billions of years ago.
To start with the very first sea creatures didn't venture into the big ocean and instead stayed close to the seabed where they felt safe.
Jellyfish have hardly changed!
Ichthyostega - the first amphibian - a creature that can live on land and in water
Birkenia - the first fish - didn't have teeth or jaws and would just suck up food
after 300 million years fish started to develop teeth and jaws
Jellyfish have been around since the beginning - but let's just clear up on question ...are they actually made of jelly ??
Jellyfish don't really produce delicious jelly. In fact, jellyfish aren't really fish at all.
Jellyfish are very simple sea creatures that have lived in the oceans since before the dinosaurs.
Their bodies are more than 90% water! Take them out of the water, though, and they become boring blobs.
Jellyfish don't have bones, brains, hearts or blood. Instead, they sense the world around them with a loose network of nerves
Inside their bellshaped bodies, jellyfish have a large "mouth"- they eat fish, shrimp, crabs, small plants, and sometimes even other jellyfish.
Jellyfish can sting with their tentacles.-most have little effect on us but a few such as the Australian Sea Wasp and the Portuguese man-of-war can kill you!
So before we go under water and properly look - have you ever wondered how creatures even move around ?
Well there are three main ways:
Flippers - they work as paddles or like a bird's wings and help large fish steer, turn, balance and stop. Flippers contain bones like our hands.
Some whales use their flippers to speed up and in some cases, flippers are even used to communicate.
Another way to move around in the water are fins!
Let's look at a seahorse for example: they have long, bumpy fins on their back which they wiggle really fast to move forward- a little like a hummingbird's wings.
They also have little fins at their side to help them steer and move sideways or up and down.
Bigger fish like sharks have a tail fin, top fins and even fins on their nose which help them move fast - more like the wings of an airplane or submarine.
The third way to move around is jet power - creatures like jellyfish, squids and octopus use jet power.
When they want to move, they contract their muscles and squirt water in the opposite direction from where they want to go - this thrusts their body forward.
80% of all living creatures on earth are actually living in the sea!
There are more than 260,000 different species down there, and that's only the ones we have discovered!
Scientists believe there are more than a million species in the oceans!! A million!
There are many different types of animal families that live in the sea. All different and amazing and fascinating. Lets look at each of the main families
First let's look at MOLLUSCS.
giant squids are GIANT- their eyeballs are the size of basket balls, fully stretched it is as long as two school buses
sea snails pull themselves into their shell for protection and close up with a door so nothing can get in!
octopuses are incredible - they have THREE hearts pumping blue blood around. If they lose an arm it can grow back!
fragile file clams have the thinnest shells ever which break easily
Nudibranches are also called sea slugs - they can be super colorful as they change their color based on what they eat
One of the biggest molluscs is the squid.
The Colossal Squid is a massive squid that lives in the deep sea surrounding Antarctica.
It's not only the largest invertebrate on Earth (it doesn't have ANY bones), it also has the largest eyes of any animal, larger even than those of the great whales - they measure 11 inches across!
There are many myths and stories about boats that would be attacked.
The ship's crew would either drown or be eaten by the monster.
One such legend is that a massive squid called the Kraken lived off the coast of Norway and would wrap its eight arms around ships until they sank.
Now let's take a look at CRUSTACEANS.
These are animals that usually have a hard covering also called an exoskeleton. They also have two pairs of antennas or feelers.
Barnacles, water fleas, and pill bugs are also crustaceans but nobody wants to eat those!
spider
People around the world eat many types of crustacea -for example, crabs, lobsters, shrimps (or prawns), and crayfish.
The largest lobster ever caught was an American lobster caught in 1977 off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada.
It weighed 44 pounds and 6 ounces (20 kilos) and is the heaviest crustacean ever recorded.
Lobsters are pretty amazing - did you know they have two types of claws: a crusher claw for breaking open food and a pincer claw for tearing it apart. If they lose a claw or leg - it just grows back!
Lobsters grow by absorbing water and bursting out of their exoskeletons.
- they can live to be over 100 years old.
- they can swim backwards by flicking their tail.
- they have sensory hairs on their legs to help them identify what they're eating
- they pee out of their face as a way of communicating with other lobsters - don't try that!
Have you heard of krill? I bet you haven't. But guess what. There's more krill in the sea than any other creature on the planet.
In fact, there's 100,000 krill for every person on earth!
In the southern ocean there's about 700,000,000,000,000 (700 trillion)
That's a lot!
So what are they ?!
- they are small, shrimp-like crustaceans that are usually no larger than a human thumb.
- they are often found in large swarms that are so dense that they cause the ocean to appear reddish-brown.
- krill are a really important food source for whales, seals, and penguins.
- they are also harvested and turned into krill meal and krill oil, which is used as animal feed and human health products.
Another family group living in the ocean are MARINE REPTILES like sea turtles, sea snakes, saltwater crocodiles and marine iguanas.
Sea snakes are the most common marine reptiles down therethere are about 55 species with most of them living in the warm waters of Southeast Asia and Australia. Stay away from themthey are as nasty as snakes that live on the earth.
There are also about 7 million turtles in the oceans and over 350 different species. Leatherback turtles have rigid, leathery top shells and can weigh up to 2,000 pounds. Some of the biggest ones grow to be seven feet long.
Did you know in some parts of the world you can swim with sea turtles! So long as you respect them and don't disturb or touch them they are gentle and happily swim with you!
Just tell your parents to take you on vacation to the Maldives, Australia or Hawaii!
- sea turtles can live to more than 100 years old!
- they can hold their breath for hours and actually sleep underwater.
- they are expert divers and can go as deep as 3,000 feet.
- when they migrate, they can swim thousands of miles.
- female sea turtles can lay between 50 and 1600 eggs in one go but sadly only one in every thousand baby turtles survives.
The next group of animals in the sea to talk about are MAMMALS. They include animals such as whales, seals, sea otters, polar bears and manatees.
They're warm blooded, have lungs like us and have a bony skeleton
Orcas, or 'killer whales' are actually not whales but dolphins!
Marine mammals rely on a thick layer of fat on their body to keep warm.
. This fat is called "blubber", and can also help by storing energy and make them swim easier.
Whales are HUGE - look how they compare to a school bus! The Antarctic blue whale is the biggest animal on the planet.
A blue whale's tongue can weigh as much as an elephant - in fact a whale can weigh as much as 30 elephants!
They breathe in and out through a special hole at the top of their head called a blowhole.
Humpback whales can sometimes eat just once a year and live off the fat from the last meal for almost eight months!
Blue whales are one of the loudest animlas on earth - the sound they make can be heard 1000 miles away
Whales are mammals like humans and we both have lungs, so to carry on swimming, they have to come to the surface to breathe oxygen just like us.
Beluga whales are also like us - they are the only whale that can make facial expressions.
Every human's fingerprints are unique to us - guess what ? Every whale's tail is unique to them.
There used to be over 225,000 Antarctic blue whales in the 1900 ' s but today there are sadly less than 2000.
The blue whale's heart is the size of a car - it has the biggest heart on the planet
Finally the last group : FISH.
There are over 230,000 fish species and although counting the number of fish is a near-impossible task, scientists have guessed there are about 3,500,000,000,000.
That's three trillion, five hundred billion fish.
If we did a book about all the fish and gave a page for every species it would be the thickest book in the world.
T h e H a d a l Z o n e 2 0 0 0 0 f t
T w i l i g h t Z o n e f u l l o f l a r g e e y e d c r e a t u r e s s o t h e y c a n s e e i n t h e l o w l i g h t M i d n i g h t Z o n e s t r a n g e c r e a t u r e s w i t h f l a b b y b o d i e s t o c o p e w i t h t h e w e i g h t o f t h e w a t e r a b o v e s n a i l s a n d w o r m s a n d s l u d g ei t s c o l d a n d m y s e t r i o u s d o w n h e r e T h e A b y s s 6 5 0 f t 3 0 0 0 f t 1 3 0 0 0 f t r j K h a l i f a
S u n l i g h t Z o n e c l o s e t o t h e s u r f a c e s o i t s s u n n y a n d w a r m a n d w h e r e m o s t c r e a t u r e s l i v e
I t ' s t o t a l l y d a r k w i t h n o s u n l i g h t b u t e v e n d o w n t h e r e y o u c a n f i n d a m a z i n g c r e a t u r e s t h a t g l o w !
I t ' s s p l i t i n t o f i v e z o n e s b u t t o g e t s o m e i d e al o o k a t t h e b u i l d i n g o n t h e l e f tt h a t ' s c a l l e d t h e B u r j K h a l i f a a n d i t s t h e t a l l e s t b u i l d i n g i n t h e w o r l d ! 2 7 1 7 f t t a l l t o b e e x a c t . . . . . . n o w k e e p l o o k i n g h o w f a r d o w n t h e o c e a n g o e s . . . t h e r e i s a n a r e a 2 0 , 0 0 0 f t d o w n , a t t h e v e r y b o t t o m o f t h e o c e a n c a l l e d t h e H a d a l Z o n e .
H o w d e e p i s t h e s e a ? W e l l . . . l e t ' s t r y t o s h o w
Can you believe that only 5% of the oceans have even been explored! More humans have visited the moon than the bottom of the ocean.
There is so much to see down there but it's really really difficult to explore and any deep-sea vessel that is built has to cope with very high pressure, total darkness, extreme temperatures, dangerous chemicals and in some parts of the world, hot fluids that erupt from the seabed.
The deeper you go, the deeper the zone, the more amazing vessel you need to get down there
Would YOU like to go deep down there?
Well...let's go together from the comfort of our seats...
Before we dive in and look at each ZONE and what's down there let's look at the sea we can all SEE first
We know the sea is full of life but just below and above like rock pools have sooo much life
If you go to many beaches you will find rock pools - a little pocket of water you can explore when the tide goes out.
It's a really good place to look for creatures who love warm shallow water.
Rockpooling is one of our fave things to do.
You can do it all year no matter what the weather -you just need to make sure you have all the right equipment!
How many items on this page do you have?
So what sort of fabulous things can we find in a rock pool?
Well obviously it depends where in the world you live but usually in England and USA you will see :
