Jump to content

Portal:Marine life

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Portal:Marine Life)
A male whale shark at the Georgia Aquarium.

The Marine Life Portal

Killer whales (orcas) are highly visible marine apex predators that hunt many large species. But most biological activity in the ocean takes place with microscopic marine organisms that cannot be seen individually with the naked eye, such as marine bacteria and phytoplankton.

Marine life, sea life or ocean life is the collective ecological communities that encompass all aquatic animals, plants, algae, fungi, protists, single-celled microorganisms and associated viruses living in the saline water of marine habitats, either the sea water of marginal seas and oceans, or the brackish water of coastal wetlands, lagoons, estuaries and inland seas. As of 2023, more than 242,000 marine species have been documented, and perhaps two million marine species are yet to be documented. An average of 2,332 new species per year are being described. Marine life is studied scientifically in both marine biology and in biological oceanography.

Today, marine species range in size from the microscopic phytoplankton, which can be as small as 0.02–micrometres; to huge cetaceans like the blue whale, which can reach 33 m (108 ft) in length. Marine microorganisms have been variously estimated as constituting about 70% or about 90% of the total marine biomass. Marine primary producers, mainly cyanobacteria and chloroplastic algae, produce oxygen and sequester carbon via photosynthesis, which generate enormous biomass and significantly influence the atmospheric chemistry. Migratory species, such as oceanodromous and anadromous fish, also create biomass and biological energy transfer between different regions of Earth, with many serving as keystone species of various ecosystems. At a fundamental level, marine life affects the nature of the planet, and in part, shape and protect shorelines, and some marine organisms (e.g. corals) even help create new land via accumulated reef-building. (Full article...)


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. (Full article...)

Entries here consist of Good and Featured articles, which meet a core set of high editorial standards.

Selected article - show another

The Devonian brachiopod Tylothyris from the Milwaukee Formation, Milwaukee County, Wisconsin

The origin of the brachiopods is uncertain; they either arose from reduction of a multi-plated tubular organism, or from the folding of a slug-like organism with a protective shell on either end. Since their Cambrian origin, the phylum rose to a Palaeozoic dominance, but dwindled during the Mesozoic. (Full article...)

List of selected articles

Marine life images - load new batch

General images - load new batch

The following are images from various marine life-related articles on Wikipedia.

Did you know (auto-generated)

More Did you know - load new batch

  • ... Orcas are versatile predators with many populations actively hunting down whales such as the Grey Whale.
  • ... there are probably types of cetaceans that are as yet unknown. For example, the Longman's beaked whale is only known from skulls washed ashore in Somalia and Australia. It has never been seen alive!
  • ... Qi Qi was the name of one of several captive Baijis held at the Wuhan Institute in China in an attempt to rescue the species.
  • ... The electroreception in sharks is so sensitive that they often mistake the minute electrical charge caused by rusting boat hulls for prey.
  • ... Some sharks can change shape. Swell sharks inflate their bodies with water or air to make themselves bigger and rounder.
  • ... the Sperm Whale was named after the milky-white substance spermaceti found in its head and originally mistaken for sperm.

Topics

List articles

Categories

Category puzzle
Category puzzle
Select [►] to view subcategories


Selected image

A Green Sea Turtle in Hawaii
A Green Sea Turtle in Hawaii
Photo credit: Tokugawapants

The Green Sea Turtle (Chelonia mydas) is a large sea turtle, the only member of the genus Chelonia (Brongniart, 1800). This turtle grows to 1-1.5 m in length, and can weigh 200 kg, making it the largest of the hard-shelled turtles. Its distribution extends throughout tropical, subtropical and some warmer temperate waters. Females lay their eggs on traditional nesting beaches, and the turtles often bask in the sand to warm their ectothermic bodies, but otherwise this species is entirely marine.

More on the Green Sea Turtle

See also

Associated Wikimedia

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

WikiProjects

Tasks

Have a look at the Marine life WikiProject and sign up.


Here are some tasks you can do, as organized by The Marine life Wikiproject:

Discover Wikipedia using portals

Purge server cache