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This article intends to show how oceanographic expeditions redefined and popularized the tropics as a space of postcolonial science and western European imagination in equal measure. From the 1950s to the 1970s oceanography was not merely a field of scientific endeavour. Popular figures like Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Hans Hass sailed the seven seas and produced documentary films. Marine animals, and the up and coming discipline of animal behavioural science, were crucial to popular perceptions of the tropics. By understanding science and perception as interconnected practices that structured the contact of European individuals with the oceanic environment, this article focuses on the continuity and discontinuity of colonial culture in these endeavours. For example, the <new> science of animal behaviour was structured by older, colonial visions of <paradise>, the practices aboard the research vessels could be linked to pirate adventures, and the representation of tropical surroundings likewise linked to the tradition of ethnographical films. Methodologically, a multilayered concept of knowledge that combines imagination and science is crucial: knowledge is not only the information gained through the observation of marine fauna, but rather an interpretative pattern by which people perceive the world and make sense of their own existence within a given environment. The aim of this article is to sketch <tropicality> from an oceanic perspective: colonial stereotypes of the seas are a way of producing new meanings for non-European environments during the time of decolonization and served as backdrop for conservation measures in the oceanic realm.