As a marine biologist in a research expedition, you need to understand how deep sea life is connected. Play this game with a friend, parent or carer to learn about some of the living things seen on Nekton's first mission investigating the deep ocean around Bermuda, Sargasso Sea and the North West Atlantic.

Activity Steps

Get ready

1. Download the deep sea life cards and print off one copy.
2. Carefully cut out each card.
3. You can color in the different animals before you start playing.

Play (2-3 players)

1. To start the game, shuffle and deal all the cards face down. Each person playing holds their cards so that they can only see the top card.
2. The player to the dealer’s left starts by reading out a category from the top card (eg Size: 50cm).
3. The other player(s) then read out the same category from their cards. The one with the best or highest value wins, and that player collects all the top cards, including their own, and moves them to the bottom of their pile.
4. The winner of the round, then, chooses a category from the next card.
5. If two or more cards share a value then all the cards are placed in the middle and the same player chooses again from the next card. The winner this time takes the cards in the middle as well.
6. The person with all the cards at the end is the winner!

More ideas

Try making a food chain from the different animals depicted on the Deep Sea Life cards.

Start with one of the living things that shows a zero feeding level, ie marked with four blank circles. This is a producer.

Then find a primary consumer that relies on this producer for food. Primary consumers are marked with one full circle out of four.

Next find a secondary consumer and so on.

What’s the longest chain you can make?

• Coloring pencils or pens
• Scissors

This is a playful way of finding out more about deep sea life. Children will learn about the size, depth and level of different animals in the food chain.

As these creatures will be mostly unfamiliar to children, it is important that they take time to learn more facts about them, before understanding how they are linked.

Interdependence is the name given to these relationships between living things. This can be a feeding relationship or symbiosis, where two organisms form a mutually beneficial relationship. An example of symbiosis is the bacteria sheltering inside giant tube worms and providing the worms with sugars created through chemosynthesis.

On each of the cards, there is additional information about feeding (or trophic to give it its scientific name) levels. Each level in a food chain has a science term.

First are the producers. These are the living things (eg algae and bacteria) that take energy from the sun or vent chemicals and turn them into basic sugars.

The next level are primary consumers. These are small animals that take these basic sugars and convert them into proteins, eg amphipods and shrimps.

Then secondary consumers are the larger animals that prey on these small animals, such as crabs and small fish.

Moving up the food chain, there are then the tertiary and quaternary consumers, larger predators such as sharks, giant squid and toothed whales. The top predator in a food chain is known as the apex predator.