Whale fall



As I mentioned in today's post, dead whales provide food and homes for a variety of marine organisms, and this video (uploaded by Kevin Zelnio of Deep Sea News) shows how whale fall communities change over time. It was produced by the laboratory of Dr. Craig Smith, University of Hawaii.The bone-dwelling worms I wrote about can be seen starting at the one minute mark.

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Well son/daughter, their decomposing carcasses bloat up, sink to the deep, dark ocean floor, where other animals rip away their flesh and consume their bones*. It may be a whole week of about vertebrates but I had to balance it out with a whale's tale of death and decomposition in which at…
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