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Marine life, sea life, or ocean life is the plants, animals, and other organisms that live in the salt water of seas or oceans, or the brackish water of coastal estuaries. At a fundamental level, marine life affects the nature of the planet. Marine organisms, mostly microorganisms, produce oxygen and sequester carbon.
An aquatic animal is any animal, whether vertebrate or invertebrate, that lives in bodies of water for all or most of its lifetime. [ 1] Aquatic animals generally conduct gas exchange in water by extracting dissolved oxygen via specialised respiratory organs called gills, through the skin or across enteral mucosae, although some are evolved ...
Whales are fully aquatic, open-ocean animals: they can feed, mate, give birth, suckle and raise their young at sea. Whales range in size from the 2.6 metres (8.5 ft) and 135 kilograms (298 lb) dwarf sperm whale to the 29.9 metres (98 ft) and 190 tonnes (210 short tons) blue whale, which is the largest known animal that has ever lived.
A common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). A dolphin is an aquatic mammal in the clade Odontoceti (toothed whale).Dolphins belong to the families Delphinidae (the oceanic dolphins), Platanistidae (the Indian river dolphins), Iniidae (the New World river dolphins), Pontoporiidae (the brackish dolphins), and possibly extinct Lipotidae (baiji or Chinese river dolphin).
Marine mammals are mammals that rely on marine (saltwater) ecosystems for their existence. They include animals such as cetaceans ( whales, dolphins and porpoises ), pinnipeds ( seals, sea lions and walruses ), sirenians ( manatees and dugongs ), sea otters and polar bears. They are an informal group, unified only by their reliance on marine ...
A seahorse (also written sea-horse and sea horse) is any of 46 species of small marine bony fish in the genus Hippocampus. "Hippocampus" comes from the Ancient Greek hippókampos (ἱππόκαμπος), itself from híppos (ἵππος) meaning "horse" and kámpos (κάμπος) meaning "sea monster" [4] [5] or "sea animal". [6]
Marine biology is the scientific study of the biology of marine life, organisms that inhabit the sea. Given that in biology many phyla, families and genera have some species that live in the sea and others that live on land, marine biology classifies species based on the environment rather than on taxonomy .
Until the 16th century, [7] sharks were known to mariners as "sea dogs". [8] This is still evidential in several species termed "dogfish," or the porbeagle.The etymology of the word shark is uncertain, the most likely etymology states that the original sense of the word was that of "predator, one who preys on others" from the Dutch schurk, meaning 'villain, scoundrel' (cf. card shark, loan ...