Awesome Ocean

Sea otters already have a fairly enviable daily routine. They float on their backs, eat an extraordinary amount of seafood and occasionally wrap themselves in kelp when it is time for a nap. As if that were not enough, they also have pockets. Not metaphorical pockets. Sea otters have loose folds of skin beneath their […]

Dolphins have once again given scientists a reason to reconsider just how clever they really are. Researchers off the coast of Queensland, Australia, have captured footage of bottlenose dolphins using empty shells to catch fish, providing the first video evidence of the behavior in this part of the country. Even more intriguing, scientists believe young […]

Whale sharks are the largest fish in the ocean, capable of growing longer than a school bus. But despite their enormous size and worldwide popularity, scientists have spent surprisingly little time seeing the ocean from a whale shark’s perspective. So researchers decided to change that. Scientists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science and Murdoch […]

A 1,400-pound manatee is recovering at SeaWorld Orlando after a severe entanglement in a crab trap left veterinarians with no choice but to amputate her right pectoral flipper. The adult female was rescued from Florida’s Indian River Lagoon near Titusville after a local couple noticed something unusual in the water behind their home. A yellow […]

A NASA-supported research team has used data from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite to produce the most detailed map of the ocean floor ever created, identifying close to 100,000 seamounts worldwide, more than double the roughly 44,000 that had previously been catalogued. The findings, led by geophysicist David Sandwell of the Scripps Institution […]

Florida’s 2026 sea turtle nesting season is on pace to set records across multiple species, according to data compiled by the state’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute. As of late June, researchers had documented 94,667 loggerhead nests statewide, the highest total recorded by that point in the season in at least five years, alongside 2,152 […]

Two whale sharks, each estimated at roughly 20 tons, surfaced alongside a Brooklyn-based tour boat on Monday about 100 miles off the coast of New York City, in what naturalists are calling the first confirmed sighting of the species in the area in nine decades. Passengers aboard the American Princess, on a 24-hour wildlife trip into the […]

A manatee named Citron was released back into Crystal River on Aug. 27, closing out a recovery that required two separate rescues, multiple surgeries and months of specialized veterinary care at SeaWorld Orlando. Officials with the park announced the release this week. Citron’s first encounter with SeaWorld’s rescue team came in 2025, when she was found […]

Imagine piloting a robot through complete darkness more than two miles beneath the ocean. Then your cameras pick up something sticking out of the seafloor. It isn’t a strange rock. It’s part of a whale. During the final dive of a NOAA-led expedition near the Cook Islands, scientists discovered a fossilized whale jaw resting approximately 3,600 […]

Some conservation victories happen overnight. Sea turtles don’t really work that way. A loggerhead turtle can take decades before she’s old enough to return to a beach and lay eggs of her own. That means the turtles crawling onto South Carolina beaches this summer may be the result of conservation work started before some of […]

There’s a dolphin on the ancient coins of Taranto, Italy. There’s one on the city’s coat of arms. There’s even an ancient story claiming Taranto wouldn’t exist without one. According to Greek legend, the city’s founder, Taras, was shipwrecked while sailing across the Mediterranean. His father, the sea god Poseidon, sent a dolphin to rescue […]

Imagine getting a phone call asking if you have room for a few rescued fish. Then imagine finding out “a few” actually means nearly 500 live animals. That’s essentially what happened to the Aquarium of the Pacific after wildlife officials intercepted two major shipments of illegally trafficked marine life in Southern California. Suddenly, hundreds of animals […]

We have important ocean news to report. There are currently two extremely fluffy baby penguins waddling their way toward adulthood at the Tennessee Aquarium. That’s it. That’s the story. Okay, there’s actually a little more to it. The Aquarium is celebrating what it calls a summertime “penguin baby boom” after two Gentoo penguin chicks hatched […]

Did you know not every sea turtle is interested in traveling thousands of miles across the ocean? Scientists studying green sea turtles in the Galápagos just discovered a group that seems perfectly happy staying close to home. Researchers tracked female green turtles after they finished nesting and found something unexpected. While many began the long […]

A male narwhal grows one tooth into a corkscrew that pushes straight through its upper lip and keeps twisting in the same direction for the rest of its life, sometimes 80 years or more. Split that tooth down the middle and the two halves spring apart on their own, unwinding by more than half a […]

Six beluga whales arrived in the United States this week, completing what a coalition of accredited aquariums is calling the largest rescue of marine mammals ever undertaken. In total, 30 belugas and four Black Sea dolphins have now been moved out of Marineland of Canada, the shuttered Niagara Falls park that had said for months […]

Did you know scientists can catch illegal fishing without ever seeing the boat? Researchers studying coral reefs in Indonesia have developed a system that uses underwater microphones and machine learning to detect the unmistakable sound of blast fishing from miles away. And after listening to thousands of hours of ocean noise, they discovered the problem was happening […]

Did you know a baby lobster starts life floating through the ocean, smaller than your pinky nail and completely at the mercy of whatever food happens to drift past? Scientists at the University of Maine just figured out that these tiny lobsters aren’t eating randomly. They have a favorite. And that preference could tell us […]

Peekachu, a 23-year-old female beluga, died Tuesday evening at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, roughly two weeks after arriving from the shuttered Marineland park in Ontario. Caretakers had noticed she was not consistently finishing her diet in the days before. Blood work indicated dehydration. As the animal care team worked through the evening to administer fluids and medicine, she […]