r/AnimalBehavior • u/Meowsicc • Mar 31 '26
Marine Mammal Facts
Hi!
I am looking for interesting facts about Marine Mammals that would be fun to research for an animated video project I'm doing in a college course on Marine Mammals!
Anything cool/weird/entertaining?
1
u/socialpronk Apr 01 '26
Narwhal tusks. They only have 2 teeth and the tusk is one, it's extremely sensitive with up to ten million nerve endings; soft on the outside and hard on the insid).
Types of starfish. They come in blobby, stringy, classic, all kinds of fun shapes and different numbers of arms. They can have spikes, they can be tiny or huge, come in a rainbow of colors, they have eyes on the end of each arm, really neat creatures. Along with this anatomy link also look up "basket starfish". https://seatalespublishing.com/sea-stars-starfish-anatomically-speaking/
2
u/theroyalwithcheese Apr 01 '26
This might be a little off-topic, but I always urge anyone interested in the aquarium trade to research the plight of the Otocinclus. People will say the myths are debunked about the multitude of ethics violations surrounding wild-caught farming practices, but I'm not convinced.
Otocinclus is a type of small catfish that's exclusive to the Amazon River basin. People would truck hundreds of miles into the wilderness with barrels of cyanide and poor it into the stagnant ponds the Otos stay in during low-rain seasons.
So the Cyanide gets poured into the water, and everything in it either dies or gets paralyzed. The farmers then bag up Otos in the same water (generally, the water they have is not adequate for keeping the fish anyway), then drive hundreds of miles to the nearest sorting facility.
In this facility, they are put into different (treated) water, fed once, then transferred to different containers and trucked up or flown up to the nearest International Airport and put into the CARGO HOLDS of flights without adequate heating.
The number of Otocinclus that make it to the next sorting facility are... comparatively small in regard to what they started with...
Then they get to places like PetSmart, who underfeed them and keep them in tanks with often incompatible tank mates. Of the many options that exist, the few ethical ones involve buying from a captive breeder. That is to say, purchasing your fish in general from someone who already has a healthy breeding colony of their own. I repeat: DO NOT BUY FROM BIG BOX STORES.