Discovery
The first known abyssal whale fall was discovered on 19 February 1977 by Navy bathyscaph pilots Lt Ken Hanson, ETCM(SS) George Ellis and LT Tom Vetter, diving in bathyscaph TRIESTE II (DSV-1) at 33° 13.0' N, 118° 32.5' W. The carcass had been scavenged completely free of flesh, but the entire skeleton remained intact and collapsed flat on the seafloor. TRIESTE II recovered a jawbone and phalanges. Given the size of the skeleton, lack of teeth and location west of Santa Catalina, the whale was probably a gray whale.
A whale fall was first observed by marine biologists led by University of Hawaii oceanographer Craig Smith in 1987, discovered accidentally by the submersible Alvin using scanning sonar at 1,240 m (4,070 ft) in the Catalina Basin. Whale falls have since been found by other scientists, and by military submarines. They can be found by using side-scan sonar to examine the ocean floor for large aggregations of matter.
The first sign that whale carcasses could host specialized animal communities came in 1854 when a new mussel species was extracted from a piece of floating whale blubber. Beginning in the 1960s, deep sea trawlers unintentionally recovered other new mollusc species including limpets (named Osteopelta) attached to whale bones.
Read more about this topic: Whale Fall
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—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)
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