On a routine expedition in 1987, oceanographers in the submersible Alvin were mapping the typically barren, nutrient-poor seafloor in the Santa Catalina Basin, off the shore of southern California. On the final dive of the trip, the scanning sonar detected a large object on the seafloor. Piercing through the abyssal darkness down at 1,240 meters, Alvin’s headlights revealed a 20-meter-long whale skeleton partly buried in sediment. On reviewing the dive video­tapes, expedition leader Craig Smith and his team saw that the skeleton was probably either a blue or a fin whale. The creature appeared to have been dead for years, but the bones and their surroundings teemed with life—wriggling worms, centimeter-size clams, little snails and limpets, and patches of white microbial mats. The skeleton was a thriving oasis in a vast, desertlike expanse.

Almost a year later Smith, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, returned for a proper study of the skeleton site. His team described several species previously unknown to science, plus some that had been observed only in unusual environments, such as at deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

This article was originally published with the title The Prolific Afterlife of Whales.

1 Comments

1. 1. Joshb4 02:54 AM 2/10/10

   SciAm editor-in-chief Mariette Dechristina made a common mistake in her introduction to this article, when she referred to Mesozoic reptiles, such as ichthysaurs, pleisosaurs, and mosasaurs (whose bodies may have hosted similar biotic communities to those of today's post-mortem whale falls,) as "dinosaurs" - which none of them actually were.
   
   Similarly, pterosaurs were not members of dino clade either - in fact dinosaurs (members of the Orders Saurischia and Ornithischia,) were solely terrestrial - none of them were marine creatures and none of them flew thru the air until, that is, the appearance of the birds, some 150 million years ago.

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