Whale Fall: Deep-Sea Ecosystem Succession

Carcass & Environment

Whale mass 30 t

Scavenger pressure 1.0×

Bacterial / decomposer activity 1.0×

Simulation speed 25 days/s

Succession State

Stage 1 — Mobile scavenger
Hagfish and sleeper sharks strip soft tissue.

Elapsed time

0 days

Organic carbon left

100%

Active consumer guild

Hagfish · sleeper sharks

How it works

A whale carcass that reaches the seafloor undergoes three sequential ecological stages, each dominated by a different consumer guild, first documented from submersible surveys (Smith & Baco, 2003). This model tracks the remaining organic-carbon fraction r(t) of the carcass with a stage-dependent exponential decay toward a residual mineral-bone floor r_min:

dr/dt = -k_i · (r - r_min),   r_min ≈ 0.05

Stage 1  Mobile scavenger      r > 0.35   k₁ ∝ scavenger pressure
Stage 2  Enrichment opportunist 0.08 < r ≤ 0.35  k₂ ∝ bacterial activity
Stage 3  Sulfophilic (chemosynthetic)  r ≤ 0.08   k₃ ∝ bacterial activity (slowest)

size factor s = (mass / 30 t)^(1/3)
k_i = k_i,base · driver_i / s

Stage 1 (weeks–months): hagfish, sleeper sharks and amphipods strip ~60–90% of soft tissue and lipids — the fastest, most visible stage.
Stage 2 (months–years): polychaete worms, crustaceans and molluscs colonize the nutrient-enriched sediment and remaining tissue around the skeleton.
Stage 3 (years–decades): anaerobic bacteria inside the lipid-rich bones release hydrogen sulfide; chemosynthetic bacterial mats (e.g. Beggiatoa) and specialists like Osedax "bone-eating" worms exploit that chemical energy the way hydrothermal-vent communities do — no sunlight involved.
Larger whales support a slower relative decay (cube-root size scaling) — a big carcass can sustain its own local chemosynthetic ecosystem for decades.

Carcass (flesh → bone) Scavengers Opportunist worms Bacterial mat

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