Awesome Ocean

Meet Xavier, Cyprus, and Jasper: the newest belugas to complete the journey from a shuttered Canadian marine park to a new home in the US, and the first all-male trio to make the trip so far. The three whales traveled more than 2,000 miles in specialized cold-water transport units, arriving safely at SeaWorld San Diego […]

Did you know there are fewer than 10 vaquita left on Earth? Scientists just made sure this species will never be forgotten — even in the worst-case scenario — by turning an entire skeleton into pixels. The vaquita is the smallest cetacean on the planet, found only in the shallow waters of Mexico’s northern Gulf […]

Did you know a coral reef can go missing for six decades and still turn out to be thriving? That’s exactly what just happened off the coast of Benin, in West Africa. Back in the 1960s, surveyors mapping the Gulf of Guinea’s fishing grounds picked up hints of a reef structure deep below the surface […]

Did you know you can prove a giant squid was somewhere without ever laying eyes on it? A team of Australian researchers just did exactly that, using nothing but a few liters of seawater. Giant squid are some of the most mysterious animals on Earth — they can grow longer than a school bus, weigh […]

Did you know a shark can have a favorite swimming buddy? New research says bull sharks do — and they’re a lot pickier about their company than anyone gave them credit for. Bull sharks have a reputation as solitary, no-nonsense hunters. A six-year study at Fiji’s Shark Reef Marine Reserve just upended that entirely. Researchers […]

Did you know sailors have been telling stories about whales ramming ships and each other for two centuries — and until now, nobody had actually filmed it happening? The most famous version of that story is the 1820 sinking of the whaling ship Essex, the real event that partly inspired Moby Dick. For 200 years, […]

Did you know the second-biggest fish in the ocean has been hiding a secret feeding habit right under everyone’s nose? Basking sharks are usually pictured cruising near the surface, mouths wide open, filtering plankton out of the water. That image isn’t wrong — it’s just incomplete. New research from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution shows […]

Warner Bros. and the Russo brothers’ AGBO are bringing Free Willy back to theaters, more than 30 years after the original film convinced a generation of kids that every captive orca just needs someone brave enough to open the gate. Real life already ran this experiment. It has an ending. The reboot’s marketing will have […]

Did you know a whale can swim around the clock, tangled gear and all, for a full 24 hours before rescuers ever catch up to it? That’s exactly the race a Massachusetts rescue team ran this week — and won. Boaters first spotted a young humpback whale off the coast of Rockport on Tuesday, towing […]

Did you know it’s illegal to touch, chase, or harass a wild sea lion in the US — even if you never lay a hand on it? An 18-year-old in San Diego just found that out the hard way, in federal court. Back in July, a viral video showed a young man approaching a sea […]

Did you know dolphins may be one of the only animals in the ocean known to grieve the way we recognize grief in ourselves? Off the coast of Western Australia, researchers with Geographe Marine Research have been following a bottlenose dolphin named Fraggle for years. Drone footage released this month shows her swimming through the […]

Did you know male humpback whales can sing the same song, uninterrupted, for up to 16 hours — all while diving, surfacing, and diving again? Scientists just found out exactly how that’s possible. Humpback whale songs are some of the most famous sounds in the animal kingdom — haunting, complex, and able to travel for […]

Did you know one of history’s biggest whale rescues involved a 22,000-horsepower icebreaker, a Bering Strait deep-freeze, and possibly a Tchaikovsky playlist? In the winter of 1984, hunters near Russia’s Chukchi Peninsula spotted something they’d never seen before: somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 beluga whales crowded around a shrinking patch of open water in the […]

Meet the pygmy sperm whale — a small, deep-diving whale so elusive that almost nobody has ever seen one alive and swimming. Most of what we know about them comes from the rare times they strand on Florida beaches. And that patience just paid off in a big way. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor […]

Did you know the ocean absorbs most of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases on Earth? That’s a big part of why what happens in the water matters just as much as what happens in the sky. According to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the average sea surface temperature across the globe’s non-polar […]

A sea creature so tiny it could sit on your fingertip and still leave room to spare — and it just became the seventh member of its entire family to be discovered in 30 years. Divers off Keelung, in northern Taiwan, kept spotting a translucent, black-and-yellow speckled nudibranch smaller than a grain of rice. Locals had […]

Did you know a fairly unglamorous little fish might be doing planet-sized work — with help from bacteria living in its gut? Meet the Gulf toadfish. It’s not going to win any beauty contests, but it does something remarkable: it drinks seawater, processes the excess salt and minerals in its intestines, and excretes solid pellets […]

Did you know the crushing pressure of the deep sea might actually be *feeding* it? For decades, scientists figured the deep ocean was basically a desert — dark, cold, and starved for food. New research says that’s only half the story. Turns out the ocean’s own weight is squeezing meals out of thin water. Here’s […]

Meet the largest animal to ever exist on Earth — bigger than any dinosaur that ever walked, swam, or flew. The blue whale isn’t just big. It’s big in ways that are genuinely hard to picture. The size alone is staggering.  Antarctic blue whales, the largest of the bunch, can stretch up to 110 feet long […]