Whale-Fall Ecosystems: Recent Insights into Ecology, Paleoecology, and Evolution

DOI Web Site 9 Citations
  • Craig R. Smith
    Department of Oceanography, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822;,
  • Adrian G. Glover
    Department of Life Sciences, Natural History Museum, SW7 5BD London, United Kingdom;
  • Tina Treude
    GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, 24148 Kiel, Germany;
  • Nicholas D. Higgs
    Marine Institute, Plymouth University, PL4 8AA Plymouth, United Kingdom;
  • Diva J. Amon
    Department of Oceanography, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822;,

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<jats:p>Whale falls produce remarkable organic- and sulfide-rich habitat islands at the seafloor. The past decade has seen a dramatic increase in studies of modern and fossil whale remains, yielding exciting new insights into whale-fall ecosystems. Giant body sizes and especially high bone-lipid content allow great-whale carcasses to support a sequence of heterotrophic and chemosynthetic microbial assemblages in the energy-poor deep sea. Deep-sea metazoan communities at whale falls pass through a series of overlapping successional stages that vary with carcass size, water depth, and environmental conditions. These metazoan communities contain many new species and evolutionary novelties, including bone-eating worms and snails and a diversity of grazers on sulfur bacteria. Molecular and paleoecological studies suggest that whale falls have served as hot spots of adaptive radiation for a specialized fauna; they have also provided evolutionary stepping stones for vent and seep mussels and could have facilitated speciation in other vent/seep taxa.</jats:p>

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