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Ocean Animals

What lives in the ocean?

Ocean animals include fish, marine mammals, sea turtles, crustaceans, molluscs and other invertebrates. Some spend their whole lives in salt water. Others depend on the ocean for food and return to land or ice to rest or breed. The photo list includes open-ocean animals as well as visitors to coasts, estuaries and reefs. Open a profile to see the animal’s scientific name, habitat tags, diet and any conservation status recorded in the directory.

Browse 212 animals

Reefs, shorelines and open water

Depth, light, temperature and shelter help explain where marine animals live. Reefs and rocky shores have crevices that shelter small animals and surfaces for animals to cling to. In open water there is little solid cover, so life there often means swimming, floating or drifting. Coastal species may use tidal flats or estuaries, where tides change water depth and salinity. An animal can use different habitats over its lifetime. A turtle, for example, can feed offshore and come onto a sandy beach to nest.

Compare a blue whale and a whale shark

Both are enormous swimmers that feed on relatively small organisms, but they belong to very different branches of the animal kingdom. The blue whale is a mammal that breathes air and uses baleen to strain krill from seawater. The whale shark is a fish with gills. It filters food such as plankton and small fish from the water. The names are a good starting point for a lesson: ask what the animals eat, how they breathe and which structures help them feed.

How to use the list

Pick a pair of profiles that show different ways of living in the sea. Compare an orca, which actively pursues prey, with a whale shark that filters small food from a much larger volume of water. Then compare a sea otter and a puffin, two animals that surface to breathe but dive to find food. Use the habitat and diet details on the individual pages to explain the differences you see in their photos.

Explore marine life with NOAA

Ocean Animals List