If you were putting together a team of real-life superheroes, you wouldn't need comic books. You'd need a boat. The ocean is home to animals with skills that sound made up but are completely true.
Here are a few of our favorites.
The octopus: three hearts and a master of disguise
An octopus has three hearts and blue blood.
An octopus really does have three hearts. Two pump blood through its gills, where it picks up oxygen. The third pumps blood around the rest of its body, and it stops beating while the octopus swims, which is one reason octopuses often prefer to crawl.
Its blood is blue because it carries oxygen with a copper-based molecule called hemocyanin. Ours uses iron-based hemoglobin, which is why our blood is red.
Then there's the disguise. With a network of pigment cells and tiny muscles in its skin, an octopus can almost instantly match the colors, patterns and even textures around it, as National Geographic describes. And because it has no bones, it can squeeze through any gap bigger than its hard beak.
The sea turtle: a compass on the inside
Female sea turtles return to the beach where they hatched to lay eggs.
Sea turtles travel thousands of kilometers across open ocean with no landmarks in sight. Scientists have found that they can sense Earth's magnetic field and use it like a map. Different parts of the ocean have slightly different magnetic "signatures," and turtles appear to read them.
That may help explain one of their most amazing habits. Years after hatching, many females find their way back to the same stretch of coast where they were born to lay their own eggs.
The whale: songs that cross oceans
Male humpback whales sing long, complex songs made of moans, cries and whoops arranged in repeating patterns. A single song can last up to about 20 minutes, and a whale may repeat it for hours.
Even more surprising, the songs change. Researchers in the South Pacific found that new songs spread from one population to the next, traveling east across the ocean, a bit like a hit tune moving from country to country.
The blue whale is the biggest animal that has ever lived.
Blue whales, the biggest animals that have ever lived, make some of the loudest calls in the animal kingdom. Their deep calls can travel hundreds of kilometers underwater.
The dolphin: half asleep and known by name
Dolphins sleep with only half of their brain at a time.
Dolphins have to come up for air, even when they rest. Their solution is to sleep with one half of the brain at a time, while the other half stays alert enough to keep them breathing and watching for danger.
They also "see" with sound. A dolphin sends out clicks and listens to the echoes, which tell it the size, shape and distance of things nearby. This is called echolocation. On top of that, each bottlenose dolphin develops its own signature whistle that works a lot like a name, and dolphins have been heard copying a friend's whistle, as if calling out to them.
More ocean superpowers, in one breath
- Sharks can sense the tiny electric signals that living animals give off.
- Sharks also lose teeth all the time and keep growing new ones.
- Jellyfish have no brain, no heart and no bones, yet they have drifted through the seas for hundreds of millions of years.
- One small jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii, can turn back into an earlier stage of its life, which earned it the nickname "immortal jellyfish."
In Spinbo, all of these animals live on the Ocean Life wheel, inside a world called Under the Sea, where bubbles drift up behind the wheel and the music sounds like the deep. Spin, meet a creature, and hear one clear fact about it in your language and in a second one.
Then quiz your crew: who remembers which animal has blue blood?
