Fish & Sea Life Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which animal, a ray rather than a shark despite its shape, carries a long flat blade studded down each edge with tooth-like points, which it swipes sideways through a school of fish to stun them and also uses, packed with sensors, to detect prey hidden on the bottom?

Question 2

Which is the smallest marine mammal, keeping out the cold not with blubber but with the densest fur of any animal, up to a million hairs to a square inch, which it grooms constantly while floating on its back, often wrapped in kelp and cracking shellfish on a stone balanced on its chest?

Question 3

Which is the fastest shark in the sea, a sleek, deep-blue open-ocean hunter clocked in bursts of around seventy to eighty kilometres an hour and able to leap several metres clear of the water, kept powerful by the same warm-blooded physiology as its cousin the great white?

Question 4

Which grey, beak-nosed dolphin of coasts and harbours worldwide, the species usually seen in aquaria and the star of the television series Flipper, gives each individual a signature whistle that works like a name and can be used to call an absent companion?

Question 5

What is the name for the group that contains the sharks, the rays and the chimaeras, whose skeletons are built of flexible cartilage rather than true bone, whose skin is covered in tooth-like scales, and which have no swim bladder, relying on a large oily liver for lift?

Question 6

Which shark has its head drawn out sideways into a broad, flattened blade with an eye and a nostril at each tip, spreading its prey-sensing organs over a wider sweep and giving it almost all-round vision, and which it also uses to pin a stingray to the seabed?

Question 7

Which Indo-Pacific octopus, discovered only in the 1990s, escapes danger by taking on the look and movements of other, more dangerous animals, flattening and banding itself to pass for a venomous flatfish, drawing its arms in to resemble a lionfish, or burying six arms and waving two like a sea snake?

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

About Fish & Sea Life

This quiz is about life in the sea: the fish everyone knows and the ones almost nobody does, how a fish is built and how it lives, the sharks and rays, the whales, dolphins and seals, the octopus and its kin, the jellyfish and corals, the drifting plankton that feed the whole ocean, and the fisheries and reefs now under strain. One hundred questions in five packs, each describing a sea creature, a group, an adaptation, a record or a conservation story and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. Seabirds belong to the Birds quiz and sea turtles to a later one; this is a knowledge quiz, not a picture quiz.

The first pack is the famous inhabitants: the great white and whale sharks, the blue whale, the orca and the bottlenose dolphin, the giant Pacific octopus and the giant squid, the clownfish and the seahorse, the electric eel, the piranha, the anglerfish and the pufferfish, the manta ray and the moray eel, the living-fossil coelacanth, the Portuguese man o' war, the coral polyp, the sea star and the horseshoe crab.

The second pack is how fish work: the swim bladder, the countercurrent gill, the lateral line, the cartilaginous fish, the shark's electric sense, the jawless lamprey and hagfish, the heavyweight sunfish and the ribbon-like oarfish, schooling and countershading, the salmon and the tuna and the swordfish, the flying fish, the mudskipper and the lungfish, bioluminescence, the hitch-hiking remora and the cleaner wrasse.

The third pack is sharks and rays: the tiger, bull, hammerhead, mako, basking, Greenland, thresher, goblin and cookiecutter sharks, the sawfish, stingray, electric ray, skate and eagle ray, the nurse shark, the wobbegong and the walking epaulette shark, shark finning, dermal denticles and the spiracles.

The fourth pack is marine mammals: the sperm and humpback whales, the narwhal and beluga, baleen, the dugong and manatee and the extinct Steller's sea cow, the walrus, the elephant, leopard and crabeater seals, the sea otter, the vaquita and the baiji and the boto, echolocation, the blowhole, ambergris and krill.

The fifth pack is invertebrates, plankton and the wider ocean: the octopus, cuttlefish and chambered nautilus, the mimic octopus, the colossal squid, the box, immortal and lion's mane jellyfish, coral bleaching and the zooxanthellae, the crown-of-thorns starfish, hydrothermal vents and the giant tube worm, phytoplankton and diatoms, the daily vertical migration, kelp forests, the Grand Banks cod collapse, bycatch and the mantis shrimp.

The wrong answers are always other sea creatures or ocean terms of the same kind. About a quarter of the questions carry a neutral photograph of open water, a kelp stand or a fishing net, chosen because it names no species and so cannot point to any option. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.