Whale Fall

UPDATE: Uploaded to another portfolio (I'm organising my things, separating my works more closely connected to things not under my alias)

Whales are one of the greatest creatures on Earth. 

If I asked you to tell me anything about a whale - the one thing that makes them most unique - I know first you would mention its size.

How large whales can get is mythical, as if dragons of the sea. My favourite is the biggest of them all, and the biggest in Earth’s entire kingdom: the blue whale. You’d expect that, for creatures so gigantic, these blues would make for frightening beasts. Really, they’re one of the gentler higher-ups in oceanic society, especially with that baleen they have in place of teeth. 

If you want a frightening whale, then look for the ones that have teeth. The sperm whale is the biggest of them, and they’re known for their rivalry with their favourite dish, the giant squid. For those interested in English literature, you’ll also recognise that they’re stars in Melville’s book Moby Dick.

Now, if you didn’t think of size for what makes whales so unique, my next guess is that you thought of their animal classification.

Whales are always contradicting themselves. Air-breathing, birth-giving mammals bound to the sea… Their bodies are built for water but also to suffocate in it; built for the air but also to shrivel in it. Some would question the logic of their evolution, but, in my opinion, they have a better fate than some of their distant cousins who live among humanity, meeting their end at the sight of headlights.

Beautiful, majestic creatures, they are. But now, imagine: a blue whale floats in the middle of the ocean. It is alone. Being one of the more solitary of its kind, no one is there to mourn him. It’s not long until he attracts the scavengers of the shallows. Seabirds and sharks invite themselves to a feast this sunny afternoon. They enjoy this for some time until, eventually, our blue starts to sink…

The ocean surface is empty now. I want to follow our whale.

He exits the Sunlit Zone. He enters the Twilight.

Already, he’s reached 330 metres. The Eiffel Tower is this height. This is also the deepest any human has scuba dived.

But, the floor below goes farther…

He has reached 500 metres. 

How far until the seabed? 

How fast do whales sink? 

Our whale’s just gone past the height of the Burj Khalifa, and now the height of Angel Falls…

At 1,000 metres: the Midnight Zone, where the sunlight can no longer reach. 

An average sperm whale dive reaches around this distance, and yet our whale keeps going. 

He’s reached the length of Sydney Harbour Bridge, and eventually 1500 metres - it shouldn’t be too long now…

***

With a cloudy, inaudible thud, our blue giant has finally met his resting place at the bottom of the sea. His carcass is lonely. Does this make you sad? Does this make you afraid? At around 1600 metres away from the ocean surface, the pressure is crushingly heavy - pitch black and numbingly cold, nothing familiar to you or me would survive here. This part of the ocean terrifies me, and the average seabed depth only goes farther. If I were in the position of this whale, surely I would have been quickly forgotten.

However, his carcass is a symbol of hope. His carcass is the birth of something beautiful. In a place so desolate, the body of a dead whale calls for celebration. This is what is known as a Whale Fall.

For instance, in a week’s time you will find our carcass decorated in strange dancing ribbons. What are they? Where did they come from? Those are happy hagfish, treating themselves to tasty whale flesh. Buzzing around them, deep-sea swimmers nip at what they can. These are the Mobile Scavengers. Within a few months, the creatures that surround our carcass reach numbers comparable to a small city’s.

If a fellow human shared our whale’s fate and attracted this kind of crowd, all their tissue and muscle would be gone in an instant. For something as large as our whale, however, the process often takes two years. There’s so much of him that there is hardly any need for competition. The scarceness of these depths seem to have humbled the greed out of these ocean-floor dwellers, especially since, for what seems like aeons, all they  relied on to keep them from starving were the small scraps of flaky nutrients that snowed from above. 

Eventually, there isn’t more tissue to satisfy the full bellies of our mobile scavengers. But if you were a small invertebrate that stumbled upon our carcass, there would still be plenty for you to feast on. You can even find a home there. The bits of sediment that have formed over time on our carcass’s bones have in particular caught the attention of you and your friends. This is the stage of  Enrichment Opportunists. Some tiny seabed crawlers pinch their share of this nutritious condominium. Other residents are worm-like, also helping to clear every last bit of whale they can find, occupying each nook and cranny there is. Our carcass has made himself the perfect ground for flourishing colonies, and, like with our previous scavengers, will house these many creatures for two years more, until he has been picked dry.

Our whale’s skeleton, now painted sulphur, is all that’s left of him, and there isn’t anything more for his tenants. We have entered the final stage of a Whale Fall; enter the Sulphophilics, lovers of sulphur. These creatures are so unfamiliar that you would hardly recognise them as animals. Most creatives – artists, writers, musicians – are peculiar people, but Nature seems to be the most peculiar of them all. Unique works of hers star in this stage of a Whale Fall: among them, worms from the genus Osedax who are attached to the bones of our carcass. What are they doing? Feeding on nutritious fats and oils, and yet, they have no mouth. 

Of the three stages of a Whale Fall, the third is always the longest. Like a monument, our whale should patiently witness generations upon generations of these strange creatures come and go as time passes by. He will watch them feed on his bones for decades to come, until he re-experiences the same number of days in his lifetime. It’s ironic how such a beautiful display of nature takes place in a space so cold, lonely and forgotten, and not even the art itself is alive to witness it. A poetic death, well suited for one of the most majestic creatures the Earth has ever seen.