In 1987, sonar on a routine submersible survey of barren seafloor in the Santa Catalina Basin picked up on something almost supernaturally large, 4,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. It was a whale skeleton, 65 feet long and sunken in the sand. Without the buoy of inflated lungs, a dead whale makes it to the seafloor relatively untouched, and then the scavengers come. This one had been dead for years, but its remains had become a teeming city in the mud, nourishing clams, mussels, limpets, and snails. This was scientists’ first encounter with a whale fall, the most benevolent kind of
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