 Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary is home to a rich and diverse community of marine life. The shoreline topography and currents in this region facilitate mixing of cool, nutrient rich waters from the north with warmer waters from the south, creating a biologic transition zone that brims with life. ...
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 Approximately 50 miles northwest of the Golden Gate Bridge, Cordell Bank rises from the edge of California's continental shelf. Although a few of this submerged island's ridges and pinnacles stretch to within 120 feet of the ocean surface, most of the bank is about 200 feet deep. Here, upwellings of nutrient rich ocean waters and the bank's topography create one of the most biologically productive areas on the West Coast.
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 Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary was designated in 1990 and encompasses 2,900 square nautical miles surrounding the Florida Keys archipelago. The region is known world wide for its extensive offshore coral reefs...
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 Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, located about 110 miles off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana, harbors the northernmost coral reefs in the United States and serves as a regional reservoir of shallow water Caribbean reef fishes and invertebrates.
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 Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary is one of the largest near-shore sandstone reefs in the southeastern United States. The series of rock ledges and sand expanses has produced a complex habitat of caves, burrows, troughs, and overhangs that provide a solid base on which the abundant sessile invertebrates attach and grow.
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 The Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary surrounds the wind-swept peaks of the Farallones islands off of the Golden Gate and encompasses over 1,200 square miles of open ocean and coastal waters. These coastal waters include bays and estuaries-from Bodega Head in Sonoma County all the way down along the San Mateo County coast.
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 Dozens of tiny islands, atolls and shoals, spanning more than 1,200 miles of the world’s largest ocean, are slowly, quietly slipping into the sea, destined to become seamounts. Hundreds of miles north of Kaua‘i, places like Nihoa, Laysan, Pearl and Hermes and Kure comprise the little known, rarely visited Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
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 Although the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary was primarily dedicated to the preservation of historical and cultural artifacts, a myriad of marine life also inhabits the areas surrounding the wreck. While some of these organisms are only passing through the Sanctuary, others live permanently within its boundaries, and some use the wreck of the Monitor itself as a habitat. As time passed after the sinking, encrusting organisms slowly started growing on the wreck which eventually attracted some larger animals and helped to develop a small ecosystem around the wreck site.
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 Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary includes our nation's largest kelp forest, one of North America's largest underwater canyons and the closest-to-shore deep ocean environment in the continental United States. It is home to one of the most diverse marine ecosystems in the world, including 33 species of marine mammals, 94 species of seabirds, 345 species of fishes, and numerous invertebrates and plants.
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 Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary represents one of North America's most productive marine ecosystems and spectacular undeveloped shorelines. Marine wildlife thrives here. Twenty nine species of marine mammals and scores of seabird species spend parts of their lives here; gray whales visit as part of the longest mammal migration on earth and albatross gather food here to return to nestlings on mid-Pacific islands and atolls.
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 Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary is the only place in the U.S. where humpback whales breed, calve, and nurse their young. The sanctuary is also home to a fascinating array of marine animals, corals and plants, some of which are found nowhere else on Earth. Its cultural heritage includes Native Hawaiian traditions of living in harmony with the sea.
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