Biggest sea creature3/15/2023 Ocean water doesn’t freeze at this temperature because it’s full of salt. The Antarctic icefish live in water colder than freezing - 2 degrees below zero Centigrade. Photo: Glenn Williams/National Institute of Standards and Technology. Tusks have no known function - but there are two clues for future marine biologists: Most males have tusks, but few females do. Each tusk is a tooth, overgrown from the side of the mouth, but extending 10 to 14 feet in length. Drinking from a “unicorn horn” was said to prevent poisoning. The tusks of narwhals were collected in the polar reaches of the North Atlantic and sold around Europe to nobles and collectors. Narwhals gave a legendary boost to the Middle Ages - as unicorn horns. They live among drifting ice in narrow channels, and they need to use sonar to see ice holes that they can breathe through. Their swollen head houses the ‘melon’, a fat-filled space that focuses incoming sound waves. Photo: iStock.īeluga whales have some of the best sonar in the sea. Similar designs on fan blades have resulted in a new generation of low-drag, high-efficiency products. But detailed testing has shown the bumps actually reduce the drag forces generated by the fins. The huge fins on humpback whales were once thought to generate huge drag forces on the whales because the fins are so long and so bumpy. One of the most exuberant animal displays in the ocean is the breaching of humpback whales. Photo courtesy of University of Delaware College of Marine Studies. To learn how this amazing creature constructs its cells and proteins across such a temperature range, the genome of the Pompeii worm is being decoded. The worm’s tail sits at the temperature of hot tea, but its tentacled head - an inch away - dips into the ice-cold water of the deep sea. The animal with the largest temperature tolerance is the Pompeii worm, which lives at the undersea hot-water vents, where hot water at immense pressure billows out from under the earth’s crust. Photo courtesy of NOAA Hawaiian Undersea Research Lab. Before some of the Egyptian pyramids were built, this coral was alive. The oldest is now known to have lived longer than any other animal on Earth - 4,270 years. These black corals grow a hair’s width a year. The oldest known animal is a coral living on the slopes of Hawaii - deep in the sea, thousands of feet below the surface, where conditions are dark and cold and slow. The coral leiopathes (deep water black coral) Thus, the very same animals hunted in the 1990s also survived human attacks 100 years ago. These harpoons haven’t been thrown at whales for over a century. This was proven by the discovery of century-old brass harpoon tips embedded in scars on the backs of whales hunted in the 1990s. The bowhead whale is the oldest living mammal. Their eyes and brains have to work so fast at these speeds that they need to be heated up, using specialized heat-generating muscles that line the eyes and brain. They can move at 40 miles per hour - powering through schools of fish, stunning them with blows from their bills, and gulping them down on the fly. Sailfish are the fastest eaters in the sea. Recently we asked Palumbi to share some of his favorite sea creatures - from the obscure to the fascinating to the just plain strange. (How about that for dinner conversation?) His recent book The Extreme Life of the Sea - written with his son, novelist Anthony Palumbi - shines a light on the wild world of sea life. As a scientist, professor and researcher, he has also shown the value of DNA identification in whale conservation and in seafood markets (see his TED Talk: The Hidden Toxins in the Fish We Eat) and traced the variation in sea urchin sperm shape. Palumbi is the director of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, where he is mapping the genome of sea corals. Marine biologist Stephen Palumbi (his new TEDxStanford Talk is The Extreme Life of the Sea) knows a lot about what goes on beneath the world’s waves. From the oldest living animal to the fastest food in the sea, they’re all pretty extreme. Marine biologist Stephen Palumbi picks 10 of his favorite underwater creatures.
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