Peter de Kruijff

Yeah, it's quite frightening.

It's like if a plane became sentient and covered in skin and just jumped into the ocean and started flapping about.

Yeah, it's always kind of got this ethereal kind of vibe from that name.

But a whale fall happens when a whale dies, either from natural causes or unfortunately from boat strike.

You know, about 20,000 to 30,000 whales die or are injured every year from whale strikes.

Gosh, wow.

But death is not the end.

The whale, you know, it's huge.

It's got very big bones.

It's just massive.

And it eventually falls down to the bottom of the seafloor where really large scavengers, hagfish, sleeper sharks, if you've heard of the Greenland shark, those sort of creatures that specialise in deep water environments, they come in, they start eating all the soft tissues of the whale over months and months.

Yeah, this whole sort of second life, if you would, of a dead whale occurs where it basically starts to nourish the rest of the ocean.

And so after you have all these big predators come in and scavenge off the whale carcass, you start to get smaller organisms that colonise the bones of the whale and the surrounding sediment.

There are creatures called bone-eating worms or zombie worms and they'll last for months or years as they kind of start to break down the smaller pieces.

And then there's a sulphophilic organism

phase so any bones or tissues that are remaining actually start to decompose and you've got bacteria that sort of breaks down the fats the lipids uh in the bones you know you get sulfur and methane these kind of gases that get released right and then that attracts more bacteria and that sort of forms these bacterial mats which that attract things like muscles and other little sort of invertebrates and this this lasts for decades that sort of stage the

Amazing.

Basically, once all the kind of good nutrients have been extracted, you have what is, I guess, kind of like a rock, like a solid structure that's left, and other things like sea sponges, glass anemones, they might sort of take root on it, and that just kind of becomes their home.

Yeah, so this is the Diamantina Zone.

It's this area about 1,600 kilometres from Perth in the Indian Ocean, middle of the Indian Ocean.