The Beautiful Things

Almost three-quarters of the Earth is covered by oceans and seas. These billions of tones of salty water are home to silent sharks, playful dolphins, huge whales, spiny orange crabs, giant octopuses with their eight long arms, friendly turtles, and fish of all shapes and sizes. Beautiful underwater gardens of brightly coloured coral provide a home for stinging sea anemones, poisonous sea slugs, and deadly cells.

Many parts of the world’s seas and oceans are too deep, dark and cold to support anything except small, simple forms of life. Other places are so fantastically deep that nobody has never been able to explore them. Someday , we may discover that even more incredible plants and animals than we imagined inhabit this silent, watery world. On the other hand sea water is full of billions of very tiny plants and animals called plankton. Most types of plankton are less than one millimeter long but without them, very little else could live in the sea.