A vast whale graveyard + Zombie sea cucumbers
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. Researchers discovered a vast whale necropolis deep in the Indian Ocean, a.k.a. a massive undersea graveyard for deceased whales. Stretching around 745 miles, it contains whale remains dating back over 5 million years. And it's not a dead and quiet place. There are at least five active whale fall sites in the zone, teeming with life.
What did researchers discover in the Indian Ocean?
Joining me now to talk about it is Nick Pineson. He studies fossil whales and excavated an ancient whale graveyard in Chile's Atacama Desert. Hey, Nick. Thanks for being here.
Thank you so much. Really happy to be here.
Okay. You were not involved with this new find, but was it big news in your world?
Oh, yeah. I was so happy to see this paper and it kind of blew my mind for a bit. And there's several reasons for that. One is the incredible logistics it takes to get the scientific infrastructure out into the ocean. to find this kind of site. They conducted at least 32 dives to go document the site. And I half expected to hear about these kinds of discoveries because we know about these whale superhighways that crosscut the world's oceans. Your chances of seeing a whale in the ocean is not equal everywhere. Whales seem to prefer certain corridors.
I didn't know that. There are whale superhighways.
Yeah. And that's a result of decades and decades of work of tracking whales, where they go to feed, where they go to eat, to mate, all through the course of... maybe a migration cycle. And you kind of expect to find the remains of those superhighways on the seafloor underneath. So there should be places around the world that you expect to find the remains of whales. And I think this is probably one of them. The other thing that's really spectacular about this finding is just the extent. I mean, we're talking about an area that in one linear distance might measure the same distance from New York to Chicago. So imagine driving from New York to Chicago and there are just whale bones littered all across the highway.
How does the whale graveyard contribute to marine ecosystems?
That's a bit mind-bending, I think.
Can you help me picture it?
Yeah. So they found two different categories of whale sites. They found the remains of fossil whales, and then they also found a whale fall that is kind of like a whole ecosystem that colonizes on the carcass of the remains from a living whale. And from that group, they found baleen whales and a lot of other beaked whales. Most of the fossil sites seem to just be beaked whales. I think that the experience the researchers must have had was just coming across whale skeleton after whale skeleton as they cruised in their submersible along the seafloor. And that's why the researchers said, you know, this is a megacite. This is a density that we have not seen anywhere else in the world.
This sounds like this is one of these whale superhighways, but is it also like the Bermuda Triangle? Why are they dying here?
Right. It seems like that there is a preponderance of deathly remains of whales, right? And that's why I think the researchers use the word necropolis to describe the mega site. And I kind of went back and forth about in my head whether necropolis was the right word because necropolis implies human intent, right? Of concentrating remains. It's also a whale necropolis is also a fantastic band name. So that's out there for somebody to grab. But what we're really seeing is that it's an exposure on the seafloor that has skeletal remains that accumulate over hundreds of thousands of years. I mean, think of it this way, is that some of those bones on the seafloor have been exposed sitting there for the entirety of our own evolutionary history.
So the geologic time span of... our own species is encompassed by those lonely set of bones on the seafloor. So if you have enough time, then you can accumulate a lot of skeletal material. You can think of it like a cave site or like a tar pit. These are places that end up recording a lot of remains from the outside environment, including the bones of animals that happen to live nearby or even in the cave itself or fall into a tar pit.
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