Do any bugs live in the ocean? Crustaceans and insects share a common ancestor, but bugs are happier on land. Water striders are the only insect that live entirely on the ocean's surface. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By some estimates, insects make up 80 percent of named animal species.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. There are plenty of annual recap lists circulating around this time of year, but few of them involve the amount of work put in by California's Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Over the past year, researchers guided remotely operated vehicles more than 3,000 feet down to survey the vast biodiversity within some of the oceans' deepest and darkest regions. The data and footage collected during these trips will help experts fill in the gaps towards understanding the planet's hardest-to-reach ecosystems. To celebrate the past 12 months of discoveries, MBARI released a video highlighting some of 2025's most stunning, strange, and mysterious creature sightings.

One of the first studies of its kind also showed mining's stark effects on the abyssal plain. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Researchers completing one of the largest impact studies on the potential environmental impacts of deep-sea mining found a bit more than they bargained for on the ocean floor: 4,350 animals, each at least larger than 0.3 millimeters. From these, they ultimately identified 788 separate species of unique crustaceans, mollusks, marine bristle worms, and other creatures living in this sought after mining zone. While the team found that harvesting rare earth metals from over 13,000 feet below the ocean's surface may not be as destructive as initially theorized, the disruptions are still cause for serious concerns.

A recent Schmidt Ocean Institute expedition off the coast of Uruguay discovered at least 30 suspected new species and explored a sunken warship. An octopus moves around deep-sea corals at 1,612 meters (about 5,288 feet) during a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, dive near the historic HMS'Challenger's' oceanographic station 320, where the country's first coral samples were collected almost 150 years ago. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. An expedition led by a team of scientists from Uruguay discovered that the South American nation's deep-sea coral reefs are thriving and teeming with life. The reefs are primarily home to numerous species that were recently listed as vulnerable to extinction.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A tiny robot fiddler crab is helping environmental scientists better understand the complexities of animal mating rituals and rivalries. And while their initial findings published August 5 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B are helping solve these ecological mysteries, the data was only obtained at considerable peril to'Wavy Dave.' Male fiddler crabs are engaged in a constant, literal arms race. The males are known for asymmetrically sized pincers, with a dramatically larger major claw compared to its smaller one. The reason for this sexual dimorphism is mainly twofold--mating and fighting. Female fiddlers generally opt for the male with the largest major claw, which the latter advertises by waving it at potential partners more quickly than his competitors.

Imagine for a second that you're a crab, and a fellow crustacean called a mantis shrimp has decided to make you its lunch. The truth is, it's not worth struggling. The mantis shrimp uses muscles to cock back two hammer-like appendages under its face, storing energy in a saddle-like divot in the limbs. When it releases the latch, the hammers accelerate so quickly, and strike your shell with such brutality, that they produce cavitation bubbles in the water, which collapse and release a secondary shockwave that knocks you out cold. That's a lot to unpack, and no one knows the struggle better than scientists. For years, they've been using high-speed photography to figure out how a little crustacean can manage what is perhaps the most powerful pound-for-pound punch in the animal kingdom--and in the significant extra drag of water, no less.

Turns out humans and crustaceans aren't so different after all, as new research has revealed that female crabs prefer mates who can'go the distance'. Fiddler crabs with the energy to keep upping the pace of their courtship displays are the most likely to attract a mate - though they still only last five minutes. Females pick males with an unrelenting dance because they have more stamina, meaning they are better fighters with bigger burrows, experts said. Scientists at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge made the discovery after introducing female fiddler crabs to specially designed waving robot claws. Scientists have found that female fiddler craps prefer mates with stamina.

The largest dinosaurs that roamed the Earth before a mass extinction event caused by an asteroid strike wiped them out (and 75 percent of all life on the planet at the time) were all herbivores, that is, they were vegetarians. But that well-established fact is being challenged by a new finding: at least some of the largest herbivore dinosaurs also ate crustaceans, or shelled animals. Ancestors of modern-day crustaceans -- which have hard exoskeletons, such as crabs, lobsters, shrimp and crayfish -- were rich sources of proteins and calcium, and ingesting them could have been linked to dinosaurs' reproductive activities, according to researchers who made the discovery in Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. "From what we know about dinosaurs, this was a totally unexpected behavior. It was such a surprising discovery we wondered what the motivation could have been," Karen Chin, curator of paleontology at the Museum of Natural History in the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in a statement Thursday.

In the open seas, the only way to hide is to disguise yourself as water. Cystisoma have mostly transparent bodies that reduce their visibility to predators. But, they also rely on an anti-reflective coating to make them even more difficult to see. Life under the sea can be nasty, brutish, and short if you don't have an effective form of camouflage. The cuttlefish's skin, for instance, holds some ten million color cells, allowing it to impersonate a chunk of a coral, a clump of algae, or a patch of sand.