Indeed. It makes me want to get my reef tank started up again. Unfortunately, I'm a little short on cash at the moment...
Love those reef tanks: Can sit & watch for hours, till this world we're in fades from consciousness. Mine is at my doorstep. Only catch is --I gotta get in it to see it. Amazing how nature works--if you sit back, observe and leave it undisturbed!.
And yet, if you're in the out in the middle of the ocean, you can go quite some time before you even spot a school of fish. Most of the ocean life lives in the reefs.
Many doctors prescribe them for people with stress related health problems such as high blood pressure. They work miracles. I know that I can sit and get lost in one for hours as well. All my problems seem to drift away while I'm watching my own little piece of paradise.
The ocean has many aspects. Consider: The ocean is a metaphor for the self, soul and others. Out of the ocean rise individual waves. Each wave sees itself alone and distinct. It is separate to all the other waves, an individual. It is one amongst many. Yet moments later the wave returns from whence it came, to be with the ocean, one and the same. It was from the ocean, it was in the ocean, and together with the other waves, it was the ocean. The ocean is the waves and the waves are the ocean. Of course on the other hand, the ocean is pretty big. Overall, not much happens and most of the time it can be pretty boring.
as reefs occur only in the shallowest areas of the vast seas, i think you'll find that most of what lives in the ocean will be found in its lowest depths... but by 'most' do you mean the total of all life [as in the total number of individual fish/plants], or just the number of species?... and by 'life' do you mean animal only, or all, which would include plants?... having sailed on many cruises [from a week in the caribbean or aegean, to transatlantic for 30 days] and spent 6 weeks aboard a container ship that crossed several of the seven seas [from new zealand to england], i can attest personally to the fact of its 'pretty big'ness!... but i've never found it boring, though i spent most of my time aboard ship watching the seemingly endless watery expanse that our relatively insignificant vessel was daring to challenge... its surface is ever-changing, though at a quick glance might only appear static... the storms were the best of all! and of course, the sightings of flying fish only yards away, hammerhead sharks nearly nudging the hull, sounding whales off in the distance, and other such sea-borne companions... for you, cog: i wrote both of those [and much, much more!] while on that P&O freighter...'twas perhaps the most wonderful experience of my extraordinary-experience-crammed life...
Best thing about the sea is being able to paddle in it Watching it fill up a sandcastle moat, or run round the sand boat. Watching the Union Jack float out to sea or catching crabs and other small creatures in rock pools (naturally putting them back when finished). Eating fish and chips, coated with salt and vinegar, with that tingly feeling on your body. Icecream, Blackpool rock and kiss me quick hats Sure its beautiful, magestic and all the rest but when you living close to a beach the number one association to me is the sea is fun and respect for its dangers
All life, animals, plants, microbes, etc. I could be recalling incorrectly, but I've seen documentaries refer to reefs as containing more types of life than other parts of the ocean combined. There aren't many fish that can live in the deep ocean, unprotected from predators. And as for the deepest parts of the ocean, where the sun can't reach, they depend heavily on the wastes (carcasses and the like) produced by surface life. We don't know much about life down there, but it isn't an easy place to live where you'd find an abundance of life. I've always seen coral reefs like jungles, and the deep ocean like open plains. Both have life, but there's a lot more diversity in life in a rainforest jungle than an open plain.
the bolded parts contradict each other... i still can't tell if you want to know where the largest number of individual animals/plants of all species live [e.g., so many millions of this kind of fish and that kind of fish, etc.; so many millions of this kind of plant and that kind of plant, etc.], or the largest number of species [e.g., so many million species of fish; so many million species of plant]... which you mean makes a very big difference to the answer, y'know... ;-)
Looking out over the sea, it seems to contain millions and millions of litres of water, and yet you only see the topmost.
Also, isn't it amazing that the ocean/sea holds so many creatures and species that we might not even know of? I don't like the beach or the sea, but when you get to a specific viewpoint when you're just looking towards the vast landscape of it all, there's no denying that it is beautiful.
The sea is pretty interesting, too--especially the Aegean Sea where I am. In Turkish there are several words for different types of waves etc, for example, 'yakamoz' is the flecks on the top of waves. We don't seem to have quite such a variety of vocabulary in everyday English, I wonder why?
Quote: "for example, 'yakamoz' is the flecks on the top of waves. We don't seem to have quite such a variety of vocabulary in everyday English, I wonder why?" Don't get mad Mad but us poor English speakers manage to stumble along. Vocabulary is interesting as it exists not only in the dictionary's but how many of whom in the various Country's use and understand, how much??. Kinda vital to writers to command the greatest volume and understand the who-what and where of context use. Speaking of "yakamoz" how do you say moonlight in Turkish?? In English those "flecks" can be "phosphorescence" at night in the moonlight or "foam" in daylight giving the wave the name "whitecap". I've spent a few years at sea and learned a lot of wave names, including "Rogue" --which I guarantee you won't enjoy meeting!. The largest dictionary in the world is the Oxford English Dictionary with about 1.5 million entries. No other dictionary even comes close. Dictionaries, however, are not the complete answer. The "vocabulary" of a language consists of all the words used by all the speakers of that language and no dictionary can capture that. The key element is how many speakers in how many different dialects speak that language. The greater the number of dialects and speakers, the greater the number of words will exist in that language at any one time. Mandarin has the largest number of native speakers, but they are regionally restricted to principally the area of northern China (with a few scattered expatriot communities). English, however, is found around the globe in very large communities (England, North America, the Caribbean, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, etc.), thus, English has the greatest regional and dialectal variety of any language on the planet. Therefore, English will have the largest vocabulary of any language because it is so dialectally diverse and is spoken natively and near-natively by so many people around the planet. I don't like to go on so-(wordy)-but as writers, this is our stock in trade and we can't have too much.
The ocean is pretty scary if you're in the middle of it and can't swim. Don't ask me how you stranded there, though.
^ Yeah.. Reminds me of that film, Deep Blue Sea or something, where there's a couple in the middle of the sea who get eaten by sharks if I remember rightly. I didn't like that film.
"English is a language that lurks in dark alleys, beats up other languages and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary." So our dictionary gets fat fast.
Moonlight is 'ayışığı' in Turkic or Arabic languages--'ay' = moon and 'ışık' = light. So we get the popular girl's name Ayşe (Aisha, I guess, with more Western spelling). It's absolutely true that English has a huge vocabulary--but I said 'everyday' English. I think it's considered affected to use this broad or poetic vocabulary in normal speech, and even somewhat discouraged in modern writing.
