Whale Falls: How death blossoms life in the ocean depths

Man has dreamed of what lies beneath the ocean since the beginning of time. Science fiction author Jules Verne famously wrote “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas” all the way back in 1870, envisioning what lies in the then mysterious aquatic depths. The book tells tales of crushing pressures, mesmerising ecosystems and untold deep sea horrors lying just beyond sight in the all encompassing darkness beneath the waves. What Jules Verne couldn’t have imagined was the beautiful dance between life and death on the ocean floor.

An artist’s rendering of a whale fall (Sourced from The New Yorker, 2019)

Thanks to modern scientific achievements, humanity has been able to peel back the mystery and uncover the truth behind what lies in the ocean depths. During modern deep sea research, we discovered the peculiar sight of whale falls. A whale fall occurs when the carcass of a dead whale begins to sink to the ocean floor after its death (Marine Sanctuary Foundation, 2023). After a few days of gas buildup causing the carcass to float, the corpse eventually begins to sink under the pressure of its weight, slowly falling until it touches the ocean floor.

These corpses carry with them a bountiful harvest of nutrients and sustenance to the many species on the seafloor (Black, 2019). The meat, soft flesh and fat are first to be picked apart by squid and shark alike, followed by the bone-boring worms feasting on the marrow, then bacteria blooming into pastures on the carcass’ skeleton. This process in its entirety can last decades, with each new whale carcass feeding its own unique ecosystem of deep sea marine life.

Marlow (2019) wrote about how this slow decomposition can be split into 4 distinct stages:

Mobile scavenger stage (months - 5 years)

Enrichment-Opportunist stage (months - 2 years)

Sulphophilic stage (up to 50 years)

Reef stage (unknown)

With each stage of this process, hundreds if not thousands of organisms can find their home around the corpse of the once proud giant. This beautiful display of how life can bloom from death, is only one of the many natural phenomena in the deep sea that we have discovered thanks to the development of newer submersibles capable of reaching the ocean floor and recording what lies below. Research is still ongoing to this day on how the stages of whale falls change over time, with some of the first whale fall sites still being studied. Since these events occur on a timespan longer than human lives, it may still be a few generations more until we discover everything there is to know about these fascinating phenomena.

References:

Black, R. (2013, March 19). Dead whale contains a bounty of life. Science. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/130319-dead-whale-antarctica-new-species-science

Marine Sanctuary Foundation. (2023, March 31). Whale Fall 101 | National Marine Sanctuary Foundation. National Marine Sanctuary Foundation. https://marinesanctuary.org/blog/whale-fall-101/

Marlow, J. (2019, February 18). A whale’s afterlife. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/a-whales-afterlife