The possibilities of what lies in the seemingly infinite blackness of the bottom of the ocean mystifies - and even terrifies - many of us (more than you might think). The above image is of the recently-discovered yellow-collared worm, which feeds solely on the decaying skeletons of dead whales. This may seem pretty trivial, but it turns out that whale carcasses support an entire ecosystem - and can do so for twenty years:
Once flesh-eaters like hagfish and sharks have picked clean a whale's skeleton, the 0.8-inch-long (2-centimeter-long) worms go to work, said zoologist Helena Wiklund, a member of the University of Gothenburg team behind the study.
Generations of worms "could be there for maybe 20 years depending on how big the whale was," Wiklund added. "Bones from a big whale last really long on the seafloor."
Pretty fascinating stuff. The deepest part of the ocean is 35,850 ft. That's a mile more than the height of Everest, which just really boggles the mind. So far researchers have found these worms at depths up to 9,842 ft., which is still pretty staggering, and one can imagine that there's all sorts of other stuff happening down there that we can't even begin to wrap our heads around. Still, there's something sort of peaceful, poetic really we find, about imagining an entire circle of life that revolves around the slow detrital disintegration by miniscule creatures of the largest animals on earth, all on the ghostly stretches of the ocean floor. The wheel truly comes full circle.
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