"Dia De Los Muertos In The Ocean Depths"
The near-impenetrable dark was relieved only when several eerily-lit ocean creatures drifted through artificial beams piercing the water. The scientists in the control van—a topside unit on the research ship equipped for viewing real-time images in the ocean—were chatting via live-streamed video to a world audience, and among themselves, as they described the myriad life forms that swam, wriggled or floated by. These scientists’ window on this underwater world was a Remotely Operated Vehicle, an ROV, connected to its “mother ship” – the E/V Nautilus, built for ocean exploration and education by Ocean Exploration Trust. As the unit descended, they described many of the same creatures they’d encountered the week before, in Greater Farallones and Cordell Bank national marine sanctuaries. Now, in the Monterey Bay submarine canyon, the robo-dives were longer, deeper, somehow more mysterious.
As the ROV approached the seafloor, the team erupted into yelps of surprise and exultation. A giant creature of the deep had loomed into view, swarmed by a host of other creatures, some ripping at it, some perched atop it, others clustered around it. But the leviathan showed no response to these assaults, didn’t budge. It was, in fact, a whale fall – the body of a whale that had long since died and sunk to the ocean floor—the abyss.
A CELEBRATION OF DEATH: Western cultures honor the dead in November with All Soul’s Day, Dia de los Muertos—the day of the dead, in recognition that life is only part of the cycle of existence. Death makes way for new life; such is the case with whales, too.
BONANZA! The whale, its species indeterminable, was a bonanza: to the marine life around it, it was a festive table laden with delectables, a submarine smorgasbord. A massive whale carcass, suddenly appearing from nowhere, is an oasis of life in the inhospitable depths of the sea and roughly equivalent, in food content to thousands of years of life-sustaining carbon particles that slowly fall to the ocean floor as “marine snow.”
While fresh, it’s the sharks, hagfish and other fishes that devour the whale’s accessible parts—the blubber, muscle and viscera—that with diligent efficiency consume over 130 lbs. per day.
THE CLEANUP CREW: When mostly hard parts remain such as bone, teeth or baleen (the sieve-like food-filtering plates that hang from some whales’ jaws) the opportunistic smaller creatures such as worms, snails and bacteria predominate. One endearing type of marine worm, Osedax (aka “snotworm”), sports colorful, plume-like gills and is a bone specialist, its acid boring into the rich marrow. It derives nutrients from a symbiotic relationship with bacteria, which may form brilliant orange/red bacterial mats that cloak parts of the whale fall, and can still harvest proteins and lipids from these tough relics.
NEW FRONTIERS: Recent advances in sub-marine technology have enabled scientists to probe the deepest ocean for the first time, where they are studying how nutrients such as carbon, nitrogen and other chemicals circulate through different layers of marine life, from unicellular plankton to giant marine mammals. Whale falls provide a great deal of information, as they release large quantities of nutrients into the ecosystem in a relatively brief period of time. NOAA and the national marine sanctuaries work to increase our understanding of how marine systems work, and pursue ocean exploration with the goal of conserving and improving the ocean’s health. Covering over 71% of the earth’s surface and containing 97% of its water, the ocean is a part of the life of every living thing on this planet.
For video and other images from the October 2019 dives in Greater Farallones, Cordell Bank and Monterey Bay national marine sanctuaries, see www.nautiluslive.org, done in cooperation with Ocean Exploration Trust, the California Academy of Sciences, and other partners.
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Learn more about your sanctuary at https://farallones.noaa.gov.
Photo Credits:
Top: Whale-fall&Bacteria
Middle: Osedax-NatHistMuseum
Bottom: WhaleFallStill- OET-NOAA
