Sea cucumbers may appear slow and unassuming, but they have developed an incredible and unforgettable defensive strategy. When threatened or attacked, as seen in this Facebook video, sea cucumbers ...

Ellen Goethel is a marine biologist and the owner of Explore the Ocean World Oceanarium at 367 Ocean Blvd. at Hampton Beach.

And in 2019, Mercier’s lab discovered that the North Atlantic orange-footed sea cucumber and an Indo-Pacific species known as the sandfish can float by taking up water through the mouth and anus ...

Sea cucumbers are marine invertebrates in the class Holothuroidea that live on the sea floor in both shallow and deep waters. They are echinoderms like sea urchins and starfish, which are also known ...

Sea cucumbers spend their lives prowling the ocean floor, scavenging for food and generally minding their own business. We ...

This slimline, eel-like fish has no scales for protection so chooses to use a sea cucumber's sphincter for safety. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission ...

They then bring the food into the sea cucumber’s mouth. It’s the ocean equivalent of a finger-licking good meal. There’s a lot of other really weird things about sea cucumbers.

Libin Zhang aims to restore sea-cucumber populations to rebalance ocean ecosystems and so that people can use their beneficial compounds. Skip to main content. Thank you for visiting nature.com.

Which isn’t to say that the sea cucumber is without survival traits. It gathers food with 20 retractable tentacles in its mouth, according to the ADFG reference page.

A sea cucumber, lying innocently on a bed of sand, looks kind of like a blob, and feels almost plushy. But although the creatures seem squishy and defenseless, ...