An international team of scientists is halfway through a month-long journey surveying the ocean floor along Australia’s eastern abyss. So far the team has uncovered a startling array of bizarre abyssal animals including a weird faceless fish and blind deep-sea spiders.
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Evolution has a way of helping life adapt to the most extreme of environments. In the case of the Mexican cavefish, help comes in the form of blindness and a skull that skews to the left. The reason for such a strange arrangement? So it can find food in the pitch black darkness of its habitat.
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It's a cutthroat world out there, and the male cuttlefish is not above using sneaky tactics to fool rivals. But what causes a mild-mannered trickster to morph into a fighter? The answer can be found in the footage below, the first of its kind to capture a male cuttlefish brawl in the wild.
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Rising ocean temperatures are wreaking havoc on coral reefs, but a new study has revealed a glimmer of hope. Some species of coral – but not all of them – appear to be adapting to the warming waters, with researchers finding less bleached coral in 2016 than under similar circumstances in 1998.
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Warming oceans might sound like a good thing for swimmers, but they're wreaking havoc on marine life. Researchers at UC Davis have found that warming and acidifying waters can cause invertebrate organisms called bryozoa to begin dissolving – and other sea creatures could soon face a similar fate.
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Hydrogen sulfide is not a gas that is usually described as life sustaining. However while its toxic fumes might knock most of us out, there is a creature that thrives on this toxic gas – the giant shipworm, a mysterious mud-dwelling creature that has eluded scientists till now.
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Small fish want to be them. Predators fear them. At first glance, you'd be forgiven for dismissing the tiny fang blenny as an easy meal ticket. However while these plankton feeders might not look like they could hurt a fly, their venom can easily make a predator's blood pressure drop like one.
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Scientists in Canada have carried out a study looking at how marine reserves can increase the numbers of less mobile fish, finding that fishing pressures in the surrounding areas also seemed to influence how quickly that evolution occurred.
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Weird is the new normal in the ocean’s twilight zone, home to all kinds of fantastic creatures, including the cockeyed squid whose mismatched eyeballs have long puzzled scientists. Now thanks to a new study, we might finally know the reason for its strange visage.
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The recent, tragic mass stranding of hundreds of pilot whales in New Zealand has rekindled debate as to the mystery behind what causes mass cetacean beachings. Solar storms, odd coastal topography and human-influenced undersea noise pollution are just some of the suspects.
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