Marine Planet
June 2021, off Herring Cove Beach, Provincetown. Michael Packard is a commercial lobster diver, and he's about 45 feet down doing what he has done for decades — working the bottom by hand, collecting lobsters, breathing off a hookah rig from the boat. Then the light goes out. Not
Marine Planet
It Has No Shell, No Teeth and No Way to Run Look at a sea cucumber on the seafloor and you're looking at something that should have been eaten out of existence a long time ago. It's a soft, warty tube. It has no shell, no
Marine Planet
A fish reportedly changed hands in China in 2009 for around $300,000. Not a rare coral. Not a shark. An aquarium fish roughly two feet long, of a species you could photograph in a tank without anyone thinking twice. It's the Asian arowana — the dragon fish — and
Marine Planet
Start with the number that makes everything else make sense. A blue whale weighs up to 150 tonnes. A krill weighs about one gram. The whale is roughly 150 million times heavier than the thing it eats. Scaled to a human being, that's a 70-kilo adult surviving
Marine Planet
Picture the ocean losing its oxygen and you probably imagine emptiness. Clear, still, lifeless water. That's not what happens. What happens is that the water gets taken over — and it changes colour. The handover Oxygen isn't just what fish breathe. It's what determines which
Marine Planet
Ask most people which animal takes over if humans vanish and they'll say chimpanzees. Same hands, same tools, same brain layout. An Oxford professor thinks that's exactly wrong — and his reasoning is better than the headline suggests. The apes go down with us Tim Coulson, a
Marine Planet
Blue Lobsters Still Turn Red When You Boil Them A lobsterman off Maine hauls a trap, and there's a flash of electric blue in among the usual browns and greens. It looks fake. It looks like someone dropped a plastic toy in the pot. It's a
Marine Planet
You've seen the headline before: dolphin saves swimmer. It feels like proof that the ocean has a conscience. Here's the part that never makes the headline. The same instinct that lifts a drowning human to the surface has also been documented lifting dead calves, sea turtles,
Marine Planet
The Deadliest Thing in This Article Is Probably in Someone's Living Room We're trained to read danger visually. Teeth, size, speed, a shark fin cutting a surface. It's a decent instinct on land and it fails almost completely in the sea. Almost nothing on
Marine Planet
One of These Animals Cuts Off Its Own Head — And Regrows the Entire Body From It Every so often you read about an animal and your first reaction isn't "wow." It's "no, that's not how anything works." These are six
Marine Planet
You Won't See It Until You Step On It — Then You Get Venom and 50 Volts at Once Most dangerous animals give you something to react to. A shape. A movement. A sound. The stargazer gives you sand. It buries its entire body in the seabed and leaves
Marine Planet
Ask most people what they're afraid of in the ocean and you'll get the same answer every time: sharks. It's the answer the movies trained us to give. But talk to people who actually spend their working lives underwater — dive guides, underwater photographers, instructors