Shadowing Practice: I Flipped 100 Rocks on the Ocean Floor, Here's What I Found... (Sea Monsters?) - Learn English Speaking with Video

The ocean floor is home to the scariest animals on the planet, like the 10-foot bobbit worm that slices its prey in half,

the stargazer that stares into your soul and electrocutes you, or the stonefish, the most venomous fish on Earth.

But since we've only explored 5% of our oceans, I want to flip 100 rocks and discover what monsters live just below our feet.

And for the very first rock flip of our adventure, we found see-through shrimp.

Obviously, shrimp are usually pink or white, so we almost miss these guys.

But there's a really good reason for this.

While see-through animals on land are extremely rare in the ocean, it's actually kind of common.

By being see-through, animals in the ocean can blend in perfectly with all the water around them.

In fact, most ocean animals are actually see-through at some point in their life, seeing as there isn't really too much to hide behind in the ocean.

But the reason we always see pink or white shrimp is

because we usually only see them when they are dead or cooked.

When that happens, a chemical reaction happens in their pigments and they become pink.

However, these shrimp are pretty close to the shore and as we get further and further in the video,

we're only going to go deeper and deeper into the ocean where we will find even crazier animals.

But for now, we need to keep flipping rocks because there are thousands of animals to find, like these guys.

Honestly, I first thought this was a cool looking rock, but I couldn't move it.

That was until we flipped stone number 20 and saw a lot of these guys hanging around and realized,

Damn, these are sea cucumbers.

These pointy bits on their backs aren't even for defense.

They're sensory receptors which help them feel the environment around them because these guys don't even have any eyes.

So yeah, it's actually pretty easy for something to just come past and eat them and apparently people do.

The only real defense these guys have is to make themselves rock hard and poop out their intestines.

But other than that, there's not much they can do.

I mean, there's even a type of eel that lives inside some of the cucumber's butts.

So yeah, that's crazy.

And they also eat sand.

They eat dirty sand, digest all the poop and dead stuff that's on it, and then poop out clean sand.

However, not all the rocks have cucumbers under them.

In fact, a lot of them have nothing.

So I won't show those ones anymore.

But what most of them do have are hermit crabs.

And this specific rock has a whole pile of them.

If you didn't know, these guys don't actually grow a hard exoskeleton like normal crabs do.

Instead, they'll find an empty shell from a snail and check if it fits their body.

And if it does, well hey, that's their home until they outgrow it.

However, it's not very easy to find a good shell, which is why sometimes hermit crabs will actually line up to

take the shell from a slightly bigger crab as the bigger one moves into a new shell.

And honestly, I think this is what was happening here.

Either that or they're trying to find a partner because it's spring right now.

However, as we start getting further away from the rocky shore and deeper into the reef,

we start to see some really cool animals that most people don't even know are even animals.

Like this guy right here, a sea sponge.

Honestly, they don't look like much, but when I started researching more about them, I learned that not only are they animals,

but they filter plankton, bacteria and other stuff out of the water to eat it and therefore purify the water.

But scientists also did an experiment on them once where they cut them up

and blended them into individual cells

and over the next few days these cells actually found each other

and joined back together as if nothing even happened in fact sea sponges are

so unique that scientists study the chemicals they have in their bodies

because they can actually help fight off diseases in humans like cancer And of course, these guys are just as insane.

This is a sea anemone.

And they are basically just a squishy tube with tentacles on top.

But these tentacles are venomous, and that soft body means they can clone themselves.

Almost anything that touches their tentacles gets attacked by microscopic, venomous harpoons in milliseconds.

And after just a few more seconds, their prey becomes paralyzed.

After they've caught it, their tentacles then curl downwards to the only opening they have in their body

and swallow their food whole.

It kind of reminds me of the sun juice we have in our garden, which is probably why I found anemones so interesting as a kid.

Anyway, after they eat their food, they poop its remains out of their mouth and can basically do this forever because they don't actually get old and die.

And yeah, whenever they feel ready for it, they literally tear their bodies in half to clone themselves.

This is similar to the starfish that we have here, who can also regenerate their entire body from just one of these fingers,

as long as a part of their central nervous system is inside of it.

Now, I don't know about you guys, but I never knew that starfish vomit their stomachs out and digest their prey outside of their bodies.

They'll grab a clam or something similar, hold it open and literally push their stomach into the clam and just digest it like that.

It's insane.

And the craziest part about all of these animals that we just spoke of is that none of them have a brain, blood or even lungs.

But they're still more related to us than they are to the algae right next to them.

Now guys, obviously you've seen quite a few animals run away from us as soon as we flip these rocks like crabs,

goby fish and stuff like that but there are just so many animals here that we can't talk about them all.

However, there are two

that I need your help with before we move on to the animals in the deepest parts of the reef.

We actually flew all the way to and traveled all across Spain to make this video.

Before we went into the reef in the Atlantic Ocean, we found this guy hiding under a rock.

Now, I'm not sure if this is the dangerous scorpion fish,

just a giant goby or maybe something else but what I am most excited to figure out is this.

We lifted up this rock and obviously didn't see much at first but whilst editing I noticed this little guy darting around.

Now I would usually just cut this out of the video thinking it was just a small fish

but these lines here kind of remind me of the legs of an octopus.

Hopefully one of you guys know what these two animals are

but of course it's time for us to go deeper into the ocean.

But for this we actually went the much safer

and warmer mediterranean ocean to hopefully see way more different types of ocean life than the atlantic

and before i could even flip our first rock we already

found a friend this guy looks like a goby similar to the ones we saw earlier

but his patterns and colors are completely different

which makes sense as there are hundreds of different types some

of these types even work with other animals like shrimp to survive.

Pistol shrimp are blind but are actually really good at building and gobies have good eyesight but can't build stuff.

So while the shrimp builds a burrow it leaves an antenna on the back of the goby

which sits at the entrance and keeps a lookout for predators

and when he sees one he dives into the burrow the shrimp feels this and dives in too.

However, pistol shrimp are named after a gun for a really good reason.

Their claws are so powerful that when they use them underwater it basically works like a gun.

And hundreds of these guys with other animals also cracking things open

and smashing things apart means that a healthy reef actually sounds like this.

I didn't know why it sounded like frying bacon at first but now we both know.

However, now that we are in much deeper water, we are coming across way more fish than before and where there are fish,

there are also heaps of sea urchins that are incredibly painful to touch and are sometimes even poisonous.

All of these little spines on their backs are as sharp as needles and very brittle too.

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So if you touch them not only will they sink into your skin

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but they will also break off and stay stuck in your skin.

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And for some tropical species these needles even inject venom into whatever touched them.

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So we need to be extremely careful with the rocks we flip here

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and where we place our hands

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because urchins actually crawl all over these boulders to to eat the algae that grows in them, which means they're literally everywhere.

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Kinda like this coral.

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This is orange star coral, which is a protected species in the nature reserve we're in right now.

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But just like the starfish, anemone and sponges we saw earlier, these guys are animals too.

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Not only do these coral have the same abilities of those soft animals we spoke of, but they also glow under UV light,

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give live birth and even attack intruders

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that get too close to them with venom and digestive acids that make them melt away.

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Honestly, life Life under the sea is insane and it only gets more extreme the deeper you go.

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However, this is when we face the biggest problems of our trip.

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While we were in the Atlantic Ocean, I nearly got hypothermia from how cold the water was.

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So to avoid going to the hospital, I wore a wetsuit for this dive.

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And although this did keep me warm, the air in the suit meant that I couldn't dive as deep as I wanted to flip more rocks.

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And while we did see so many amazing fish and life over here, there are three animals I really want to see.

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One of them being the stargazer.

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I mentioned it at the start of the video, but these guys literally electrocute fish that swim past them to stun them and then eat them.

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They dig into the sand and hide their bodies

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and stare up into the sky while wiggling their tongue to attract nearby fish.

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This is how they got their name and also why they look like a skull that just lays on the ocean floor.

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But as soon as you get close to them, they use modified muscles inside of their eyes to shock you with up to 50 volts of electricity.

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This is the same as four car batteries connected to each other.

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After that, there is the flying Gurnard.

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It looks pretty boring at first, but if you get close enough to it, it literally shoots its fins open and frightens of predators,

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thanks to these huge colorful wings that also make it look three times bigger.

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It's also kind of strange because it basically walks on the ground instead of swimming,

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but I think the most insane thing I want to find has got to be a sea salt.

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These guys are long chains of see-through muscle.

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And although they kind of look like jellyfish, they have a primitive spinal cord.

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Which means they are more related to me and you than they are to jellyfish.

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But what makes them so insane is that they are the fastest growing animal on earth.

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Every hour, they grow 10% bigger.

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They literally go from being born to a couple hundred feet long in just two days.

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And I am so glad they are peaceful because I would hate to fight one of these things.

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However, seeing as I had to wear a wetsuit to get into the ocean and couldn't dive deeper because of it, I do want to come back for a part two

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and flip the remaining rocks of this video to find what other crazy sea monsters we can find.

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I will even get scuba tanks and dive down as deep as the government will vet me.

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But only if we hit 50,000 likes.

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You need to subscribe and like the video so that I know it's what you actually want to see.

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Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you in the next one.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: I Flipped 100 Rocks on the Ocean Floor, Here's What I Found... (Sea Monsters?) - Learn English Speaking with Video

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What is the Shadowing Technique?