Whale Fall: The Rise of New Ecosystem and Food Web
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-prolific-afterlife-of-whales/
Whale fall refers to the process of whale carcasses sinking to the bottom of the ocean. The whale fall process produces organic matter that becomes the source of energy for organisms in deep-sea ecosystems. Scientists estimate that the carcass of a whale can support a circulatory ecosystem denominated by decomposers for over one hundred years. Whale falls go through three overlapping stages starting with the mobile scavenger stage. Scavengers such as hagfish and sleeper sharks will strip away the majority of the whale’s soft tissue. In the second stage, the enrichment opportunist stage, communities of organisms colonize the sediments surrounding the whale carcasses and the exposed bones and feed directly on the blubber and scraps of nutritious soft tissues. This stage is dominated by bristle worms and crustaceans. At the final stage known as the sulfophilic stage, specialized bacteria break down lipids contained in the bones, aerobic bacteria dissolve sulfate and release sulfide, and certain chemosynthetic bacteria take oxygen from the ocean to oxidize the sulfide to generate energy for growth. This stage can last up to a century.
The food network and the nourishment of a specialized ecosystem dominated by decomposers that are at the bottom of the food chain greatly relate to what this class is about: networks. Chemosynthetic deep-sea bacteria form the base of the food web that contains a variety of marine life ranging from tubeworms, clams, fish, and crabs. Clams are a part of lobsters’ diet (20%) and are then taken into a $524.5 million lobster fishing industry to be bought and eaten by humans. Each of these edges glosses over a bit of complexity but at the end of the day, the lobster you may be having for dinner can potentially be linked to the death of a whale in the ocean. Every organism is the node and the relationship between consuming and being consumed is the edge. Food webs demonstrate how energy flows across an ecosystem, and it shows the importance of networks. Network links everything together: living and non-living organisms, information, economics, social relations, time, and more.