The small, soft worms have the power to disappear a whale skeleton, scattering larvae into the current that will drift until they encounter bone. In the largest whales, this third stage can outlive many of us, lingering for as long as a century until all that is left is the mineral husk of bone. It even outlives the whale itself, surpassed only by the bowhead whale, which may live to be two hundred years old. If a whale’s life is a marvel, its death is its legacy.
