Deep ocean

25 to explore

• Watch 3D Animal Basking shark The basking shark is the second-biggest fish in the world, after the whale shark. It swims slowly near the surface with its enormous mouth open, sieving tiny floating animals called zooplankton out of the water. It is gentle and lives mainly in cool seas.
• Watch Animal Blue whale The blue whale is the largest animal ever to live on Earth, bigger than any dinosaur. It is a baleen whale: instead of teeth it has bristly plates that strain huge mouthfuls of seawater to catch krill. Blue whales live in every ocean except the Arctic, and their deep calls are among the loudest sounds made by any animal.
• Watch 3D Animal Chambered nautilus The chambered nautilus is a relative of octopuses and squids that lives inside a coiled shell full of sealed rooms. It moves up and down along deep reef slopes by changing how much gas and water are in its shell, and it finds food mostly by smell.
• Watch Animal Colossal squid The colossal squid lives deep in the icy Southern Ocean around Antarctica. It is thought to be the heaviest animal without a backbone: one caught in 2007 weighed about 470 kilograms. Its arms and tentacles carry sharp, turning hooks, and in 2025 scientists filmed a living one in the wild for the first time.
• Watch 3D Animal Giant isopod The giant isopod is a deep-sea relative of the pill bugs and sowbugs you find under garden stones, but it can grow to about 50 centimeters long. It crawls over the dark sea floor of the western Atlantic, cleaning up dead fish, squid and other food that sinks from above.
• Watch Animal Giant oarfish The giant oarfish is the longest bony fish in the world: it is usually about 3 meters long, and some have been reliably measured at 8 meters. Its silver, ribbon-shaped body has a red fin running all the way along its back. It lives in the open ocean, often hundreds of meters down, and drifts upright, head up, while it feeds on tiny krill.
• Watch Animal Giant oceanic manta ray The giant oceanic manta ray is the largest ray in the world, with wing-like fins that can stretch more than 6 meters from tip to tip. This gentle filter feeder funnels plankton into its wide mouth, and it has a single pup only every two to three years.
• Watch Animal Giant Pacific octopus The giant Pacific octopus is the largest octopus species in the world, living in cool waters of the North Pacific from Japan to Alaska and California. It hunts crabs and clams at night, changes color and skin texture at will, and can squeeze through a hole only a few centimeters wide.
• Watch Animal Giant squid The giant squid is one of the biggest animals without a backbone. Most of its length is two very long, stretchy feeding tentacles. It lives deep in oceans around the world, and it is so hard to find that the first photos of a living one in the wild were taken only in 2004.
• Watch Animal Giant tube worm The giant tube worm lives more than a mile deep in the Pacific Ocean, beside hot springs in the seafloor called hydrothermal vents. It has no mouth and no stomach. Instead, billions of bacteria living inside its body make its food from chemicals in the vent water.
• Watch 3D Animal Great white shark The great white shark is the largest of the mackerel sharks: a strong, torpedo-shaped fish with a gray back and a white belly. It hunts fish, seals and sea lions, and it is partly warm-blooded, which helps it stay active in cool water.
• Watch Animal Greenland shark The Greenland shark is a huge, slow-moving shark of the cold North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean. It grows very slowly in the cold, and in 2016 scientists used the lenses of its eyes to estimate that it can live for at least 272 years, longer than any other animal with a backbone that we know of.
• Watch Animal Humpback anglerfish The humpback anglerfish is a small, round, black fish of the deep, dark ocean. A long spine on the female's head ends in a glowing lure, lit by tiny bacteria, which draws prey close enough to catch in her big, toothy mouth. The males are tiny, only about 3 centimeters long, and their job is to find a female.
• Watch 3D Animal Humpback whale The humpback whale is a baleen whale famous for leaping out of the water, slapping its giant flippers and singing long, complex songs. It lives in every ocean and makes one of the longest journeys of any mammal, between cold feeding waters and warm waters where calves are born. Once hunted almost to extinction, it is now recovering.
• Watch 3D Animal Indo-Pacific sailfish The sailfish is a long, sleek ocean fish with a tall, sail-like fin on its back and a long, spear-shaped upper jaw called a bill. It hunts schools of small fish in warm seas, folding its sail away to speed up and raising it to make sharp turns.
• Watch 3D Animal Japanese spider crab The Japanese spider crab is a gentle giant of the sea floor off Japan. Its body is only about the size of a large pizza, but its legs can stretch almost 4 meters from claw tip to claw tip, more than any other crab. It crawls slowly along the bottom, eating dead animals and plants.
• Watch Animal Leatherback sea turtle The leatherback sea turtle is the largest turtle on Earth. Instead of a hard shell it has tough, rubbery skin over a layer of tiny bones. It eats jellyfish, dives deeper than any other turtle and swims thousands of kilometers between feeding waters and the beaches where it lays its eggs.
• Watch 3D Animal Megamouth shark The megamouth shark is a huge, slow shark with a big, rounded head and an enormous mouth. It swims with its mouth open to gulp tiny shrimp called krill and other small animals. It lives far out in the open ocean and is so rarely seen that scientists did not know it existed until 1976.
• Watch 3D Animal Ocean sunfish The ocean sunfish, or mola, is one of the heaviest bony fish in the world. Its body is tall, round and flat, with a long fin on top, another underneath, and a strange frilly edge instead of a tail. It dives deep to eat jellyfish and is often seen resting at the surface, perhaps to warm up.
• Watch 3D Animal Orca The orca, also called the killer whale, is the largest member of the dolphin family and the ocean's top predator. Orcas live in every ocean, in close family groups called pods, made up of orcas related through their mothers. Each group has its own favorite foods, hunting tricks and even its own calls, which young orcas learn from their families.
• Watch Animal Smooth-head blobfish The smooth-head blobfish lives on the deep sea floor off southern Australia, 600 to 1,200 meters down, where the water pushes in hard from every side. Its body is soft, with loose skin and no scales. In the deep, the water pressure helps hold it in shape, so it looks like a fish. Pulled up to the surface, that pressure is gone and its body sags, which is why photos look so 'blobby'.
• Watch Animal Sperm whale The sperm whale is the biggest whale with teeth. Its huge, boxy head is about a third of its body, it dives deep into the dark ocean to hunt squid, and it makes the loudest sounds of any animal.
• Watch Animal Swordfish The swordfish is a huge ocean hunter with a long, flat bill like a sword. It swings its bill to slash at fish and squid, then eats them. It dives deep into cold, dark water by day, and a special 'brain heater' near its eyes keeps its brain warm. Grown-up swordfish have no scales and no teeth.
• Watch 3D Animal West Indian Ocean coelacanth The West Indian Ocean coelacanth is a large, blue, spotted fish that lives in deep, rocky waters off eastern Africa. Its group was known only from fossils and thought to have died out about 66 million years ago, until a living one was found in South Africa in 1938.
• Watch 3D Animal Whale shark The whale shark is the largest fish in the world. This gentle giant swims through warm seas with its huge mouth open, filtering tiny plankton and small fish from the water, and every whale shark has its own pattern of pale spots.