![]() ![]() The second is known as the "enrichment-opportunist stage," where smaller organisms comb the surrounding sediment for decomposing tissue. "Like your family coming from all over the country for these events, different species come from all over the deep sea to feast on this huge amount of carbon that has just arrived," she says. But every so often, something larger reaches the sea floor.ĭiva Amon, a deep-sea biologist and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Natural History Museum in London, likens the arrival of a whale fall to a Thanksgiving buffet. ![]() ![]() These species have adapted to live in the extreme environment of the deep sea: a cold region of immense pressure and intense darkness.ĭown there, most creatures subsist on dead and decaying material that falls from the surface, forming " marine snow" - dead plankton, dead animals shells, fecal matter, and other inorganic material. Whale falls are places of evolutionary novelty, sheltering species first discovered on the bones of dead whales. Whale falls become ecosystems unto themselves. Their carcasses - known as "whale falls" - become an energy-rich habitat, drawing a wide variety of organisms from across the deep sea to feast. What happens after a whale dies? Most fall. Fallen whale carcasses, abundant in the deep-sea, are now studied as ecosystems unto themselves. ![]()
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