How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures

by Sabrina Imbler

Scientists say there can be a fourth stage of whale fall. They call it the reef stage. The bones, sapped dry of all their fat, are reduced to mineral remains. The whale is no longer food but terrain. If the bones are not buried, they become a part of the landscape. The expanse of deep sea is dominated by soft mud and silt, and suspension feeders drift in the deep water in pursuit of hard fixtures like bone, onto which they latch and settle for the rest of their lives. Scientists have observed this final stage in a whale bone spotted in abyssal plains nearly three miles deep, somewhere between Hawai‘i and Mexico. The bone had become glazed with manganese, an element that precipitates out of seawater over thousands of years, suggesting the whale sank more than ten thousand years ago. A trio of anemones, clasped on the metallic fossil, unfurled their tentacles like fireworks to catch any food that drifted deep in the abyss. The anemones had found a home on the remains of a creature once so staggeringly alive that it inhaled metric tons of krill each day and fertilized entire food webs with its waste, its hundreds of pounds of heart beating through the water with no sense of what was to come.