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The Ocean is important to all life, including yours. Join us.

Welcome to the Ocean Portal – a unique, interactive online experience that inspires awareness, understanding, and stewardship of the world’s Ocean, developed by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History and more than 20 collaborating organizations.

You are among the first wave of visitors to the Portal, an experience which we hope will empower you to shape and share your personal Ocean experiences, knowledge, and perspectives.

The input you provide through feedback modules and comment boxes will help us to shape future Ocean Portal content and functionality. Like the Ocean, which is made of millions of marine species, your comments, questions, and clicks will help to bring the Portal closer to the vastness and variety of the Ocean itself.

Collaborator Contributions

Fossils of teeth from Giant Megatooth Shark

Megalodon Teeth

Two fossilized teeth from a megalodon (Carcharodon megalodon) dating back more than 20 million years.

In the 19th century, many women wore tight corsets that were stiffened with stays made from baleen.

Whale Products in Fashion

In the 19th century, "whalebone" was an important fashion tool—however, it wasn't made out of bone, but whale baleen. Dried baleen was flexible yet strong, and used to create structure in clothing, such as tight corsets, used by high-fashion women to present a curvy waistline, collars and hooped frames for skirts. Other products that used baleen included umbrella ribs, riding crops, buggy whips, and hat brims.

Giant eyes spot prey. Huge claws grab the prey, and a tiny mouth rips it to shreds.

Phronima

This tiny, shrimplike creature is no more than 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) long, but it’s as ferocious as a shark. Its giant eyes spot prey. Huge claws grab the prey, and a tiny mouth rips it to shreds. The prey never sees what’s coming, because Phronima’s transparent body blends into the surrounding water. More about deep ocean exploration can be found in the Deep Ocean Exploration section.

A right whale opens wide, revealing huge plates of baleen hanging from its upper jaw.

Right Whale Baleen

A right whale opens its mouth wide, revealing huge plates of baleen hanging from its upper jaw. There are between 200 and 270 baleen plates on each side of a right whale's upper jaw. They work like a giant sieve to catch the whale's food. Strong but flexible, baleen is made of the same substance as your fingernails - keratin.

Discover more about this species in A Tale of A Whale, a photo essay about a whale named Phoenix.

Brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) nest in a mangrove in Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands.

Pelican Nest in Mangroves

In Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) nest at the top of a mangrove tree. Many other kinds of birds—as well as insects, frogs, snakes, and lizards—live in the canopy of mangroves. More about mangroves can be found in our Mangroves featured story.

This queen parrotfish scrapes algae from Caribbean reefs with its parrot-like beak.

Queen Parrotfish

Munch, munch. The queen parrotfish (Scarus vetula) scrapes algae from Caribbean coral reefs with its parrot-like beak. While feeding, hard stone and coral inevitably get mixed into its lunch, which in turn gets ground up by the fish and deposited back into the ecosystem as sand! This fish is an adult male. But when young, parrotfish have the ability to change sex, depending on the population’s needs.

This is one of about 200 species of moray eels that live in tropical and subtropical coral reefs.

Guineafowl Moray

This guineafowl moray (Gymnothorax meleagris) is one of about 200 species of moray eels found in tropical and subtropical coral reefs. Moray eels are a type of bony fish. Many species, like this one with a brown body and white spots similar to a guineafowl, are named after their distinct appearances.

This lionfish, with fins and venomous spines extended, is an aggressive predator.

Spotfin Lionfish

The spotfin lionfish (Pterois antennata), with venomous spines extended, is native to Indo-Pacific reefs, but has invaded reefs in Florida, the Caribbean and is moving up the Atlantic coast. It probably escaped from an aquarium. Lionfish are aggressive predators and threaten local species. It is also referred to as a turkeyfish because depending on how you view the lionfish it can look like the plumage of a turkey.

Photograph from above of a lavender-colored sea-slug with deep purple markings, swimming above a pink and orange surface.

Nudibranch

The feathery strands at the back of this nudibranch’s (Chromodoris willani) body are no mere adornment: they’re its gills!

Blob Sculpin, A Deepwater Fish

Blob Sculpin

The ghoulish “blob sculpin” (Psychrolutes phrictus), a deepwater fish found off the Pacific coast of the U.S. from the Bering Sea to Southern California, can grow to about 70 cm (more than two feet) in length and eats small invertebrates.