A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1039 entries
whale fall
A whale fall is the carcass of a whale on the deep seafloor and the community that lives on it. In a place where food arrives only as a slow drift of particles, several tons of flesh and bone landing at once is an event of enormous consequence, and it supports a succession of specialists for decades: scavengers first, then animals living in the enriched sediment, then organisms feeding on the oil in the bones.
Etymology
The English term is plain and recent, dating from the 1980s when submersibles first found one and worked out what they were looking at. It sits alongside marine snow, as the other half of how the deep sea eats: a constant fine drizzle of small particles, punctuated very occasionally by something enormous.
Notes
Around sixty species are known only from whale falls, including bone-eating worms of the genus Osedax, which have no mouth or gut and dissolve their way into the bone with acid, extracting the fat with the help of bacteria. Since whale falls are scattered, rare, and temporary, how those species find the next one is one of the standing questions in deep-sea biology.