The Unseen Deep-Sea Legacy of Whaling

First come the sleeper sharks and the rattails and the hagfish, scruffily named scavengers of the sea, along with amphipods and crabs who pluck delicately at bits of flesh. Tiny worms, mollusks, and crustaceans arrive in their hordes of tens of thousands, to sift through the seafloor sediment for tasty morsels. Then forests of luridly colored tube worms capable of secreting bone-dissolving acid spring up; there are snails grazing on bone dust, and mussels hoarding chemosynthetic bacteria in their bodies, scattered through the sediment like coins. Finally, anemones and filter-feeding tube worms wave like flags from the ramparts of ribcage and vertebra. All this deep-sea life sustained by the death of one whale.

Whale falls—the ecosystems that coalesce around cetacean carcasses when they sink to the seafloor—have become an object of fascination, even veneration, among scientists and the general public alike: the frisson of a intersecting with our adoration of and identification with the largest animals Earth has ever known. “The idea of life after death, I think, is something that’s reassuring: that we’re all part of something greater,” says Craig Smith, a retired oceanographer and one of the scientists who in 1987 discovered the , a 20-meter-long blue or fin whale resting in peace