What is hidden in the sand, around a wreck or among the algae? Dive.Explo360 articles build on your underwater observations to help you understand marine habitats, species’ ways of life and their relationships within ecosystems.
Develop your knowledge of marine life while diving: discover the features of different environments, learn to observe their inhabitants and connect your discoveries with the marine species guides and the dive videos. These readings accompany divers and anyone curious about underwater life, before or after exploring.
Your marine region: Mediterranean. Choose a marine region, then search for a subject or filter articles by category and topic. Each publication shows its availability and access conditions.
Region labels show where the topic applies. Articles that cover several seas may use tropical examples, even in the Mediterranean catalogue.
44 articles
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restArticle region: Mediterranean
Biotope · Environment
Look down on a Posidonia meadow and you’ll see fish passing over the leaves. Look between the blades and you’ll find smaller animals. Posidonia is a Mediterranean flowering plant. Its leaves grow from stems called…
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restArticle region: Mediterranean
Way of life · Behaviour
Spot a pile of shells and pebbles beside a crack? An octopus may have eaten there or shifted the stones to change its doorway. Look for other clues before deciding whether it’s still inside.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the rest
AvailableFree accessArticle region: Mediterranean
Biotope · Environment
After a storm, you might find a bank of brown ribbons on a Mediterranean beach. They’re leaves from Posidonia, a flowering plant that grows in underwater meadows. Some leaves stay among the shoots, while others wash…
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Biotope · Environment
Off Cyprus, a lionfish spreads its fins as it creeps towards a smaller fish. Its ancestors came through the Suez Canal. Rabbitfish and cornetfish took the same route. Why did some of these newcomers become common while…
Available1/3 public · licence required for the rest
AvailableFree access
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restArticle region: Mediterranean
Biotope · Natural history
Follow a diver along a Mediterranean rock wall. Purple fans jut out from the cliff, and some face a different way where the rock turns. Sea fans stay fixed in place, so the water has to bring their food to them.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Natural history
Watch a sea cucumber crawl across the sand. Its tentacles are busy picking up grains, and little rolls of sediment lie behind it. What can the animal find to eat in a mouthful of sand, and what comes back out?
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Behaviour
A cloud of sand billows up from a feeding ray. A blue runner darts in after prey. On a Red Sea reef, a grouper shakes its head at a moray eel, which may then join the hunt. Following another hunter can pay off in very…
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Behaviour
A moray can sit in a crack with hardly any of its body showing. Its jaws keep moving. Watch just behind the head and you’ll find two small openings that help explain why.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Behaviour
A shark on the seabed may look asleep, even with its eyes open. But it could be wide awake. To tell the difference, researchers check how readily it reacts to a disturbance.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Anatomy · Science
A sole settles on the sand. A sea squirt attaches to a rock. Both start out swimming, and the changes in their bodies help explain how they make the move.
AvailableFree accessMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Behaviour
A stopper stands between an octopus and a crab. On a Red Sea reef, a grouper loses its prey in a crack it can’t squeeze into. In both cases, getting to the prey takes a change of approach.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Behaviour
A pair of mandarinfish rises above the coral to spawn. The ascent lasts only seconds, and it takes two fish moving in step to make it work.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Natural history
A sea star can start digesting a mussel while it’s still in its shell. A sea squirt lets the water bring its meal. Follow those two meals, then see how a fish catches a shrimp and a sea cucumber finds food in the sand.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Natural history
In the deep Atlantic, fish gathered around a dead marine mammal. They were catching the little crustaceans that had come to feed. As the body broke down, it provided food in ways that were harder to see.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Natural history
A fish smaller than your hand can drive away a much bigger grazer. It may be protecting its next meal. Elsewhere on a reef, the prize could be a clutch of eggs or a safe place to hide.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Natural history
A scorpionfish blends into the rocks, while a brightly coloured sea slug is easy to spot. An anemone stays fixed in place as its tentacles sway. Each animal uses chemicals in a different way to catch food or avoid…
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Natural history
A parrotfish settles inside a cocoon of mucus. Three sharks lie still beneath a ledge. What would tell you whether they were asleep?
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Natural history
When a dominant fish disappears from a reef, another may take over. In some species, the change can go far beyond behaviour and reach the organs that make eggs or sperm.
AvailableFree accessMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Natural history
Imagine looking out from a crack in the reef. Something nearby looks like a meal. For a fish approaching a frogfish’s lure, a little closer can be close enough to get caught.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Natural history
A current carries a fish egg into open water. If it hatches, the larva must find prey small enough to eat and, in some species, reach the seabed. Other young begin life close to a parent that guards the eggs.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Ecology · Natural history
A parrotfish is settling down just as a squirrelfish comes out to feed. Out beyond the reef, darkness brings a different kind of change. Tiny animals that spent the day deep in the water begin to swim up.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Anatomy · Natural history
An octopus can lose part of an arm as it pulls free of a predator. Once it reaches shelter, the missing section may grow back. How long before the octopus can feel with it or use it to grip?
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Ecology · Natural history
A wave can light up for a moment as it breaks. Its flashes may come from living things too small to see on their own. Deeper down, a glow can bring a meal closer or make a fish harder to spot.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Ecology · Natural history
A grouper stops beside a little cleaner wrasse and opens its mouth. The wrasse may take a parasite, or it may bite off some of the slippery layer that protects the grouper’s skin.
AvailableFree accessMultiple marine regions
Anatomy · Science
A sea fan looks like a single animal until you get close enough to see its many mouths. Each belongs to a polyp. To see what makes them a colony, look beneath the tentacles, where living tissue joins them together.
AvailableFree accessMultiple marine regions
Ecology · Natural history
A meadow offers food and shelter. A mussel takes food from water moving past its rock. Follow what happens to that material and you can see how living things shape the sea around them. The illustrations show…
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Ecology · Environment
On a flat stretch of sand, a sunken ship can rise like a wall. On rock, it adds more crevices to a seabed that already has them. A wreck can settle on sand, on maerl beds made up of small pieces of calcareous algae, on…
AvailableFree accessMultiple marine regions
Biotope · Environment
Waves and currents keep moving the sand, and many of the animals that live there stay buried. Look for a trail, a shell or a little mound. These are often the first signs that a sandy seabed is full of life.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Biotope · Environment
At first glance, a maerl bed looks like a patch of colourful gravel. The hard branches that build it belong to red algae. As they pile up, the spaces between them give other organisms somewhere to live.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restArticle region: Mediterranean
Biotope · Environment
A Posidonia meadow begins with a flowering plant that spreads slowly along the seabed. Its leaves produce oxygen and shelter animals. Beneath them, roots and stems help hold sediment in place and build up a layer that…
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restArticle region: Mediterranean
Biotope · Environment
In the Mediterranean, sea fans and sponges can grow on walls and platforms that living things helped build. It can take centuries, or even thousands of years, for these coralligenous habitats to form. Their rough…
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Miscellaneous · Natural history
A sponge, a sea star and an anemone look very different. To make sense of that variety, scientists sort animals into major groups called **phyla**. Animals in the same phylum share features of their body plan. Once you…
Available1/3 public · licence required for the rest
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restArticle region: Mediterranean
Ecology · Science
A small crustacean eats plankton. A fish eats the crustacean, and that fish may become a meal for a larger one. In the Mediterranean, food can take that route or drift down as scraps to the seabed. Both routes are part…
AvailableFree accessMultiple marine regions
Way of life · Behaviour
A school is a group of fish that swim together and coordinate their movements. The whole group can change shape or turn in moments. Each fish helps keep the school together by reacting to the fish swimming near it.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restArticle region: Mediterranean
Anatomy · Science
The smooth skin of a moray looks quite different from the rough skin of a shark. Both help protect the fish. A closer look at the surface can also explain how some fish blend into the seabed or signal to one another.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Anatomy · Science
A fish can hang in the water without sinking to the seabed. How does it do that? Many bony fish have a **swim bladder**, a small sac filled with gas that helps them stay at the same depth. Sharks and fish such as…
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Anatomy · Science
A fish can follow its neighbours even when the water gets cloudy. It can use sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, and it has another way to sense what’s nearby. Its lateral line picks up movements in the water.
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Anatomy · Science
When a fish swims past or water sweeps around a rock, it changes the flow nearby. Fish can feel those changes with a system called the lateral line. It gives them another clue alongside sight, hearing, smell, taste and…
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Anatomy · Science
A fish can use its eyes to find food or spot another fish coming towards it. As it swims deeper or into cloudy water, the colours and shapes it can see may change. Sounds, smells and movements picked up by its lateral…
Available1/3 public · licence required for the restMultiple marine regions
Miscellaneous · Technique
Look closely at a reef or a patch of sand and you might spot an animal you’ve never noticed before. Some divers try to name the fish, plants and other living things they meet. They also watch what those creatures do and…
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