The Ocean Bug That Can't Get Wet

There are at least 900,000 species of insects and the ocean is the largest biome on the planet, so you would think there would be tons of insects riding the waves. But it turns out the sea skaters are the only ones weird enough to make it work.
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Sources:
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Images:
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• Chalcid wasp
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[@ScionStorm1]

_He was a skater bug, she said 'see you later, bug' he wasn't good enough for her_

[@origaminosferatu3357]

Comments you can hear. ^^

[@sofastealeroffensive]

Sad bugs life

[@AuliaAF]

Sorry, bug, you're missing out :D

[@zach11241]

I love your comment, but one suggestion: “she said SEA you later!” 😊

[@simohayha6031]

Avril Lavigne

[@yeeturmcbeetur8197]

“The ocean is just bigger water” Hmmm. Yes.

[@bonsaitree4965]

Yes, very wise.

[@yeeturmcbeetur8197]

@Filipineboi mountain are just bigger rock 😳

[@infinitestuds]

The earth is just a wet bolder with air

[@midloran]

With more interesting stuff

[@e.d.i2668]

And trees are just bigger grass

[@ThatJaymsWisdom]

"Because the ocean is just bigger water right" is my favourite thing I have heard in months. And you aren't wrong 😂

[@svchineeljunk-riggedschoon4038]

Well, yes, but...

[@Chump2025]

"...from the standpoint of water.. " TFG

[@alphatrion100]

An island....surrounded by water... big water....OCEAN water

[@camilaribeiras6311]

When?

[@alphatrion100]

@@Chump2025 bigly

[@fastinradfordable]

“Does he get wet Or does the water get him instead”

[@Music.cigars.2024]

This one is so underrated

[@LordZanba]

Nobody knows.

[@adamgreenspan4988]

Q: What’s he like? A: It’s not important.

[@FigureSk8ngViking]

the water gets him. noone else has listened to and understood him the same way that water did, it just gets it

[@joshriley2936]

A They Might be Giants reference? That's unexpected.

[@a.j.kimball1240]

There actually are more oceanic insects! Well, more like semi aquatic marine insects. Seal lice live on pinnipeds like walruses, seals, fur seals, and sea lions and can hold their breaths for extended periods of time and withstand over 5,000 feet of pressure.

[@wxlurker]

I had no idea there was lice for marine animals too! Interesting to know.

[@lezlie2k2]

Sea lice are not insects. They are crustaceans

[@a.j.kimball1240]

@@lezlie2k2 yes, you are correct, there are animals called sea lice, and those are crustaceas. Im talking about *seal* lice. These are true lice that live on seals, sea lions, fur seas, walruses, and otters. They are indeed true insects. Its very neat

[@combive8744]

Thank you for this new knowledge

[@cheesenipspartymix]

Theres tons of aquatic parasites that exist. I wouldn't really count those as bugs though, because they live entirely underwater and die without a host.

[@carlwheezerofsouls3273]

catching one of these things labeled you as a higher being, they were so skiddish and quick, like a mosquito on the water. taking small bursts of speed and ripping across the surface of the water, just to vanish behind a rock or something.

[@VincentGonzalezVeg]

Jellyfish baby

[@BloodoperaBlackvomit]

The most soothing voice in biology is back. I love watching/listening to her. Greetings from The Netherlands.

[@PrincessColumbidae]

I am very jealous of that bat shirt.

[@zolacnomiko]

This was the only thing I wanted to comment about. Come for the beasties, stay for the fashion. What an amazing shirt!!

[@vanessaanderson497]

Octonauts did an episode of them! Glad I got to learn more about them through you guys.

[@badendhappy2903]

Sea Skaters: Hey, let's try to evolve to survive in a perpetual salty avalanche.

[@michaelhowell2326]

Wow, this video has successfully made me feel stupid. I'm 33 and I have never thought about the fact the oceans aren't crawling with insects. I am defeated.

[@sonorasgirl]

Maybe it’s a 33 year old thing, cause I never thought about it either. (Also 33)I think I just assumed crustaceans had that niche so bugs couldn’t take it

[@midloran]

Dude how?

[@midloran]

Dude how?

[@midloran]

Like you can expect everything from ocean

[@HighlanderNorth1]

👉 I was swimming in the ocean in the Palm Beach County area in 2018, when a spider floated by me. He was standing ON the water. Thinking it was a land spider swept out to sea, I carried it about 100 feet back and released it in the coastal bushes and small trees lining the beach. It didn't look like ^these sea skaters.

[@williamchamberlain2263]

Nice. It probably wasn't going to have a good time out at sea.

[@TrugoyEveryDay]

That was so wholesome

[@Liboo52]

So you’re tellin’ me that giant garbage patch in the ocean is a fricken’ NEW HABITAT that has a POSITIVE EFFECT on a particular species of animal, and since this animal is close to the bottom of the food chain it could provide a new food source for even more animals?! We truly are living in the Anthropocene Epoch

[@zray2937]

This channel is gold.

[@rayaya6580]

I almost forgot the word biome actually applies to real life and not just minecraft

[@jack.8735]

pls me too

[@felipegx4495]

kkkkk me too

[@ThizzlainyaTwizzla]

Y'all Minecraft weirdos got it twisted lol

[@unfunnyhere4990]

Dang you guys need to touch grass

[@mebansharaisantasticokhong7312]

Bro's brain is cooked

[@Hoshimaru57]

So that’s what those things are! My family has a cottage on a pond in Plymouth and I grew up with the knowledge that water striders were little black circular dots with 4 long legs and 2 really short ones. So I’ve always been confused when I looked them up and got a completely different creature. What we have are freshwater sea skaters

[@MRptwrench]

Can't unsee the sea skater jumping out of the way of that (relatively) giant drop of water that some "scientist" very intentionally aimed and released at the poor thing! Mahadik, Hernandez-Sanchez, and Arunahalal I'm pointing my finger at you! And don't act all innocent over there Et AL, if that is even your name! Peta has been CC'd on this.

[@Drowningpooralice505]

I was taken with my dad and some of his boys from the Navy to sail to ward Hawaii (half way) then come back. We investigated a floating pile of debris and it was crawling with these things. It was a weird experience we felt a kinship with them. Two groups of land animals out to sea that can only meet there where they shouldn't be.

[@SaiyanHeretic]

Humans: irresponsibly polluting the ocean Sea skaters: It's free real estate!

[@briansquibb999]

Love Bizarre Beasts! Thank you for a very good presentation!

[@Hayatehiroyuki25]

As I learned from one of the Land Before Time sequels, The ocean is some "Big, Big, Big BIG WATER~"

[@BatteredWalrus]

never heard 'Water Striders' I've only ever heard them referred to as 'Pond Skaters' here in the UK

[@iitzfizz]

Yup same

[@origaminosferatu3357]

Represent!

[@okavara3833]

Always heard em called water skippers

[@gildedvulture7965]

They're also referred to as Jesus bugs too. I always called them water striders

[@cleverusernamenexttime2779]

We called them water spiders. I'm from Indiana, take it for what you will.

[@CMZneu]

YES! at last some decent info on marine insects. Isn't there something wrong with the comparison of G forces experienced by small organisms and us, this is like the whole "ants can lift 100 times their weight so...", while it is true it's still deceptively impressive, at smaller scales organisms don't work or experience stuff like we do. For example is perfectly normal for insects to lift many times their weight... what i'm saying is that at those scale few things are proportional.

[@BizarreBeasts]

Indeed! The physics gets pretty complicated and counterintuitive. We touch on it for half a second, but the article we pull from also has a good section about energy density for very small insects. "The energy density in the ocean dissipates rapidly towards scales approaching the Kolmogorov length such that the maximum size of turbulent eddies is of the order of 5 cm and contains only 1% of the maximum energy." Really wild stuff! www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64563-7

[@iitzfizz]

Right on, the more mass you have have the more you affected by gravity

[@svchineeljunk-riggedschoon4038]

@@BizarreBeasts Hi, someone asked me in an above comment if I caught any fish in the Sargasso sea, I posted a link to a pic on my Instagram, but my comment got deleted. I then just told them to search for me there to see the pic, and that comment got deleted too. Wtf?

[@AnkhAnanku]

What is the stress experienced at 40 Gs for a fraction of a second vs 3 Gs over the course of minutes? Is that really enough time for the little bugger’s hemolymph to pile up in their feet and make them pass out?

[@xxportalxx.]

@@svchineeljunk-riggedschoon4038 a lot of yt channels use what are essentially bots to go through the comments and remove spam and posts from other bots, a lot of times something they're getting rid of is soliciting (usually in the form of 'click my link and watch/buy my stuff pls pls pls!') So these bots being quite simple generally just scan for urls or partial urls and delete them. Really annoying and fairly common on well produced channels. Like I had an experience where I was trying to post a link to a page on the video creators own website and it deleted it lmfao

[@nickcosimano5028]

I saw these once at the beach and thought nothing of it, now I have a new interest for these little buggers.

[@herbertkeithmiller]

I'm curious about one thing that wasn't mentioned salt. Where do they get freshwater or do they drink salt water and then eliminate salt? Other ocean-going land animals have to make that adaptation. And the hardest thing for fish to do is keep a ionic balance in their bodies.

[@cleverusernamenexttime2779]

The ocean has a thin layer of fresh water from rain. It doesn't mix in. It was talked about in a sea snake video I watched. Pretty sure it was Sci-show.

[@herbertkeithmiller]

@@cleverusernamenexttime2779 Ah yes now that you mentioned it I remember that. 😃

[@julianadams3710]

“This may surprise you, but insects are land animals.” The Waterbug: *Suprised Pikachu face*

[@svchineeljunk-riggedschoon4038]

I've seen some of these hanging around Sargasso weed when I was becalmed in the Sargasso Sea.

[@NewMessage]

Well... Next time my Dad refers to lobsters as 'sea bugs', I'll have a snarky retort for him!

[@dickrichard626]

They are bugs tho...?? They just aren't specifically "insects". Arthropods are arthropods.

[@DonKrieg-382]

its genuinely interesting that insects are so rare in the ocean even mammals and birds live there

[@SephieRothe]

I love the ocean bugs. I also like the land crustaceans that live in the leaf litter near my home.

[@BlueRGuy]

S p i d e r s

[@LordZanba]

@@BlueRGuy I s o p o d s

[@bingus_factory]

@@BlueRGuy spiders belong to the subphylum Chelicerata, while crustaceans form the subphylum Crustacea. spiders are not crustaceans. oddly enough though, horseshoe crabs are not crustaceans, but chelicerates just like arachnids

[@catrinacheng5087]

...that is weirdly cute

[@midloran]

Ikr I see them often in pools (:

[@paceyombex]

So I'm not tripping. I saw one of these little fella when I fish yesterday. I thought it was a water strider

[@DracarmenWinterspring]

5:50 - I get why living longer is an advantage for a spread-out species like that, but why would growing slower be an advantage?

[@verthandi8379]

Slower growing, less consumption of energy?

[@DracarmenWinterspring]

@@verthandi8379 Sounds plausible. I thought the reason there were so few sea bugs might be that it's hard for something small to catch any food on the sea surface.

[@haydentempest3874]

For an animal with an exoskeleton growing can be very energetically taxing. If they do have to deal with periods of starvation it's probably good not to go through several moults in rapid succession

[@zolacnomiko]

Things like longevity, growth, and metabolism tend to be linked in biological systems.

[@cleverusernamenexttime2779]

Grow slow, live long. It's kind of a trend in the animal kingdom.

[@nathanaelmcmahan872]

I've never bought anything off of KZbin CC's. For the first time, when I go to support and buy, the pin club is full! 😭😭😭

[@fern5505]

It’s open again now!

[@sggy_nOodls]

most bizarre beast episodes: (really cool sciency stuff) this one: *the ocean is just bigger water*

[@duckzncatz]

"Do you see 'em? I don't see 'em. Damn these No-see-ums." lol

[@onlinecroc4873]

I didn't know there's a bug in the open ocean surface. Thanks Bizarre Beast for the amazing content.

[@erictaylor5462]

I'd be willing to bet that the reason so few insects live in the sea is because the sea is a place not many people go, and those that do spend only a tiny part of their life there. The vast majority of undiscovered insect species could be living in the sea.

[@ScionStorm1]

Surskit: Ocean edition

[@kaichisaki5267]

-grabs a bucket of water-, - finds water stridder- , - dumps bucket of water on stridder- And this is how you make wet stridder

[@thanhavictus]

The insect's would-be niche is already filled by their cousins the crustaceans anyway.

[@deadspaceissacman]

When other bugs see the sea skater, they yell “do a kick flip”

[@instaperil]

There's more than 5 sea bugs we've only explored 10% of the ocean

[@wormthirtyfour]

yeah, weve explored the surface waters, how do you expect an insect to survive at hundreds of metres under the water unless they are a parasite on/in a mammal

[@Ieatcrumbs]

"so now we're at sea... How are we going to get back?" One bug: "I have an idea..."

[@ggibson262]

I love the trio jumping from the water surface....too groovy.....bugs rock!

[@keithb6717]

I’ve seen them 1600 miles from any land between Mexico and Hawaii where little birds called Storm Kestrels eat them without landing on the water. Literally thousands all around.

[@theredcorner1776]

0:25 Damn. Those are nice.

[@cleverusernamenexttime2779]

I approve of this message

[@MrFishBlood]

Phylogenetic analysis teaches us that all insects are crustaceans. Keep up the great work!

[@jenovapooh]

That haunting music sounds so familiar, it's driving me nuts. I feel like I've heard it in a video game

[@RandomTask678]

0:22 Oh hey it's the Bug Museum near Colorado Springs with its giant beetle! What a neat little place to check out for being in the middle of nowhere.

[@midloran]

I often see these guys in the pool swimming fast and cleaning the pool from drown insects :D

[@nope_]

It's like 2 am and I need to remember to watch the rest of these videos when I wake up

[@culwin]

Great Pacific Garbage Patch: hated by everybody sea skaters: It's free real estate

[@stevecannon1774]

Growing up in Oklahoma, crawdads were often called “mud bugs” . No matter the name they are mighty tasty.

[@SirSayakaMikiThe3rd]

I call them crawdads, and yes they taste good

[@MyFavouriteVDO]

Q: What does a sea skater Do when it's finds its mate? A: it dances with it!

[@MrChazz10]

I don't know how or why bugs living on top of water even evolved, even humans who don't really live on water get eaten by big fish that live in there!

[@ariannabuehler3813]

The eerie opener music was on point

[@ReicHHere]

Just when I thought the ocean couldn't be more terrifying now I have to worry about the waters surface too

[@The_CIA]

*Sea skater lookin' like Patrick from Spongebob.*

[@naomihirsch2796]

Omg I need that shirt!! PLEASE tell us where you got it??

[@JonLasaga]

I have seen these water skater type bugs in freshwater alot around my home usually in the canals but I had no idea they were capable of living in the ocean.

[@meltingatom]

It's funny to think that those lil bugs have no idea how they can, they just know they can.

[@Pprlgs]

Subnautica devs: "write that down. WRITE THAT DOWN!"

[@itslexactually]

Me: why aren’t bug types weak to Water Game Freak: *sweats nervously*

[@ILikeToBeAlive]

You’re an underrated channel

[@kakerake6018]

A human can also withstand 40g at the durations a seabug can possibly generate during acceleration.

[@brianshea2515]

Neat video. Important question: where does one purchase this shirt?

[@nisfornoble4861]

Can you waterboard a water bug? "Tell me where Nemo is!?" *Waterbug looking at me like wtf bro* "Seriously I'm just breathing here my guy"

[@mrdudeman29]

Wooo! Always happy to see a new update!

[@GhostOfSnuffles]

"The ocean is bigger water" Yes, the floor is made of floor.

[@discounthorde1944]

All I have learned from this video is that there are water striders in the ocean but they smol bois, and also that the trash we have thrown in the ocean is simultaneously both hurting and helping various species in the oceans.

[@joe9743]

Im a lobsterman, please do a video on sea lice! They are the clean up crew of the ocean floor!

[@liltitan9435]

This should be on PBS!

[@laurachapple6795]

'... that we know of.' Wow, that was ominous.

[@TheeOne4.44]

I bet Silverfish/ Earwigs are related to Sea Skaters... I encountered Earwigs living in a home by the River. They are attracted to moisture & dark places. They swarmed into my home every time it rained and are VERY ABRASIVE like Ants once they smell water. They have claws like a Crab and lifts their back stingers up when they feel in danger.. They live in the walls, cracks, any space of a place like Roaches, and the same goes for any soil around a home/building etc. .. They are at your front step! Those bastards are crafty too! A bunch of Earwigs got into my Pet's food & water bowls that has lids on😖 I moved since then...

[@ieatavocadoseeds5381]

The thumbnail look like Patrick Star if he got transformed into a freaky bug.

[@atis9061]

Ocean currents and chance encounters, how romantic!

[@1TakoyakiStore]

I was hoping that this was gonna be about Remipedia. Not exactly insects but they're the closest relative that actively lives in the ocean.

[@Theonetrueerenyeager]

Fun fact: insects are crustaceans!

[@Splodnik]

Wikipedia is saying that Crustacea is 'paraphyletic', but that seems silly. Insects are crustaceans, just like birds are dinosaurs.

[@fly1714]

It's the things in my bathroom that pop once in a while and flow it down the drain

[@darkerdaemon7794]

I grew up in NC about an hour from the eastern coast. I used to go to the OBX beaches for years and those sea skater things were everywhere, we used to get them in our backyard pool. The worst however has to be dock spiders which are exactly what they sound like. Spiders that love docks. Big gnarly bastards that look like jumping spiders on steroids and crack that can literally jump 3+ feet in a single bound over water surfaces and traveled in herds. Where you see one dock spider expect a hundred more of them hidden nearby. Pretty sure sea skaters were one of the dock spiders favorite snacks, aside from fish of course. Yeah, dock spiders hunt fish.

[@afjer]

Rather than washing out and then adapting, it's probably more likely that the skaters got washed out to sea all the time and the ones that survived were the ones with mutations that allowed them to survive.

[@phoxgames5800]

Austronauts experience up to 9gs and certain arial manuavers allow fighter pilots to reach up to 12gs

[@PexiTheBuilder]

"I pay more attention to insects than the average person!" I pay more attention to insects than to persons.

[@fernandoolivera1986]

The bug on the thumbnail is cosplaying as Patrick Star

[@little__moth]

i'm always so excited for bug episodes!

[@kvd1]

The only other kind of salt water insect is a lice that feeds on seals and sea lions.

[@askthebubble28]

Water Strider: Bruh they took over me

[@clausluger4570]

(flexing with mooscles) "Are sure about that?"

[@kinnikuzero]

The narrator has such a nice calming voice

[@midloran]

SiMp

[@kinnikuzero]

@@midloran 🤷

[@chrisdelatorre2810]

I can’t be the only one that thought it was a cursed version of Patrick

[@danielhale1]

Me: Ah yes, the water skeeter! I remember the fresh water versions being all over when I was a kid! Them: ...you call it that? Not a water _strider_ ??? Me: Yea, isn't that okay? Them: We can't be friends anymore

[@breadwithoutbread8668]

Man the video image made me think of patrick

[@mark6302]

oh i scooped up a bay nettle this weekend and it had tiny little isopods in it too :0

[@jemmapellemma8185]

I wanted to learn about the sea skater but I didn't expect its life history.

[@sydneyconcerts902]

100% they are needed and crustations are kinda tiny oceans filters

[@bunkusdundongo6675]

That colored bug thumbnail done got Patrick Star's pants and skin.

[@rabih1978]

Thank you, nice video

[@williamchamberlain2263]

Hold it - these are bugs who coat their hairy legs with armpit wax? Got my new morning routine sorted.

[@ユリの花-d2k]

0:52 what is name of that insect?

[@DukeRamrod]

I know I'm 3 years late but nobody answered you, it's a bagworm, I think a Lepidoscia. Idk the exact species but yeah

[@detrolfire]

I’m from the future