In the deep sea, food is rare. Sunlight doesn’t reach. Almost everything that lives down there relies on tiny scraps of dead matter - “marine snow” - drifting slowly down from the surface. So when a whale dies and sinks to the seafloor, it’s like an entire feast crash-landing in a desert.
A whale fall feeds the deep for decades. First, slime-coated hagfish and big sleeper sharks rip into the carcass. Then crabs and worms move in to clean up the bones and tissue. Eventually, special chemical-eating bacteria colonize the skeleton, dissolving fats and minerals out of it.
Some species live nowhere else in the world except on whale falls. They drift through the deep sea waiting for the next dead whale to drop out of the sky, then bloom into life, eat, breed, and disappear when the carcass is finally gone. A single whale carcass can support this whole pattern of life for 50 years or more.
