Question: what is your fariovite sea creture

James Bell answered on 16 Jun 2014:

Great question and a very tough one to answer because I find lots of sea creatures really amazing.

One of my favourites has to be orcas (killer whales) for a couple of reasons. Firstly they are really beautiful but also because they are highly intelligent. Orcas have complex behaviours and have been shown to have emotions like humans. There have been scientists who have observed orcas helping disabled members of their groups by giving them food (that’s really rare in the animal kingdom).

What I like best about them is that orcas have a really wide range of ways that they can hunt and feed too. Some orcas eat small fish like herring, some eat seals, some eat stingrays and some even eat whales that are much bigger than themselves. All the orcas that eat one of these things do it with essentially the same equipment (teeth etc.). Animals usually have adaptions towards a certain kind of food (like baleen whales do for filtering out tiny shrimp) but orcas have learnt how to catch all these different kinds of food and can adapt better to what’s available. This shows that they are amongst the cleverest and most resourceful of animals.

My other favourite, and this is perhaps more a favourite group, is the deep-sea animals that can make their own light. This is called bioluminescence and loads of animals can do it in the deep-sea and there’s lots of theories as to why. It’s a really amazing adaption and also really incredible to watch. There’s lots on youtube about bioluminescence so check it out!

Probably the most amazing that I personally study are special kinds of tube worms called siboglinids (don’t worry if you don’t know that word but it’s there to help you google them if you want to). These animals don’t have mouths, stomachs, guts or butts!! How do they feed? Well, they have special bacteria that live inside their bodies that make food from certain kinds of chemicals (including the rotten-egg smelling chemical found in stink bombs). These animals are totally dependent on these tiny bacteria and are found in lots of places in the deep sea. Some even grow at up to 2m per year!! (that’s more than a human is likely to grow in their entire life)