Whale remains that sink thousands of feet under the water find much less hospitable climes. What sharks and other scavengers don’t devour gets swiftly decomposed by bacteria. The upper levels of the ocean are packed with hungry creatures waiting for an easy meal. If a whale dies in shallow water, it doesn’t take long for its body to get broken down. For the nutrient-poor deep sea, this is a true bonanza of nutrients. A single whale corpse can have over 2 tons of carbon. The death of a whale is a huge event wherever it happens, but it has the most impact when the whale remains sink to the deep ocean floor. When they die, that energy suddenly becomes available to the wider ecological community. They can eat almost 8,000 pounds of krill in a single day and their bodies represent immense stores of biologic energy, accumulated over the course of decades, or sometimes even centuries. The heart alone of the gargantuan blue whale weighs 400 pounds. Whales are the largest animals that have ever lived. How can life exist in the deep ocean without getting energy from the sun? They’ve found other sources of food, and evolved some very special features to help them make the most of it. Photosynthesis is integral to most communities, but somehow the animals living deep underwater have found a way to survive. Below that depth, photosynthetic activity quickly ceases. Light can only penetrate 3,300 feet through seawater, and the range where there’s enough light for photosynthesis to take place is even more restricted. The deepest parts of the ocean are over 36,000 feet below sea level. Even so, there are some animals that live beyond reach of the sun’s rays. Without the sun providing a base amount of energy input, most ecosystems would swiftly collapse. Animals eat the plants and algae, and then get eaten themselves by predators higher up the food chain. Plants or algae use sunlight to create food through photosynthesis. On both land and sea, the sun is the primary source of energy in most ecosystems.
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