
Whale fall - maze-le
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall
======
benwerner01
Biologists reacting to a Whale Fall discovery:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZzQhiNQXxU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZzQhiNQXxU)

~~~
Sharlin
Their excitement made me so happy!

~~~
FartyMcFarter
I'm guessing you're not a whale?

~~~
Sharlin
I mean, I'd love to have my body be so useful after I die.

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haukur
While not exactly the same, the concept of "whale drift" has existed in
Icelandic law [1] for almost 8 centuries, and still applies today. It
specifies to whom a whale carcass would belong to, depending on the situation,
and so forth. The concept of "whale drift" also exists in the Icelandic
language, and is used to point out an event as a stroke of great luck.

[1] Hvalreki (whale drift) in Icelandic law, from Jónsbók in 1281:
[https://www.althingi.is/lagas/150b/1281000.401.html](https://www.althingi.is/lagas/150b/1281000.401.html)

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BeeBoBub
Whale fall described in chapter 81 of Moby Dick:

 _Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm Whale
is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately accounted for
it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy, with its side or
belly considerably elevated above the surface. If the only whales that thus
sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard
diminished and all their bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some
reason assert that this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in
the fish so sinking, consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him.
But it is not so. For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with
noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of life, with
all their panting lard about them; even these brawny, buoyant heroes do
sometimes sink._

~~~
echelon
It might be me personally, but I can't stand old, long-winded and effervescent
writing. My eyes start to jump around in it, and I can't maintain focus. It
makes me wonder how our writing and media will be perceived in a hundred or
more years.

Entire patterns of thought become antiquated as our communication wiring
adapts to the ever increasing pace of society. Social media is driving
dopamine hits from shorter and shorter forms of engagement.

It's amusing to think that Harry Potter might one day read like an opaque
relic.

~~~
PostOnce
I think the opening paragraph of Moby Dick is one of the most memorable of all
the novels I have read; I think it would be hard to drive home the emotion
with the same gravity in fewer words, and I'll paste it here in case I can con
someone else into reading it :)

> Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little
> or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I
> thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It
> is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.
> Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp,
> drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing
> before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet;
> and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it
> requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping
> into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account
> it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for
> pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his
> sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If
> they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other,
> cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

~~~
linksnapzz
The "Catskill Eagle" sermon from Chapter 96 is possibly the most beautiful
prose ever written by an American. I don't understand how it is legal to get a
HS diploma in this country without having read that book.

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isoprophlex
Whoa, apparently they are rather important for carbon sequestration!

See the section on the impact of whaling:

> However, it is suggested that the removal of large whales might have reduced
> the total biomass of the deep sea by more than 30%.[24] Whales stored
> massive amounts of carbon that were exported to the deep sea during whale
> fall events. Whaling has thus also reduced the ability of the deep sea to
> sequester carbon.[24]

------
EndXA
I found this video for those who want a visual example of what this can look
like:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZzQhiNQXxU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZzQhiNQXxU)

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alangibson
The spacing of them and the specialization of scavengers is surprising.

When I woke up this morning, I had no idea that deep sea whale carcases would
constitute an entire hidden global ecosystem, but that's just another day on
HN I guess.

~~~
nck4222
I had the same thought, which made me think how little we know about the
ecosystems on earth, which made me think it's even more important to protect
the environment. We destroy things before we even know they exist.

~~~
steve_adams_86
I get conflicting thoughts about this. Sometimes I feel we must have killed
countless deep sea dwelling species without ever seeing them. Then sometimes
I'm amazed by the resilience and scale of the ocean and wonder if somehow,
very few species have gone extinct because of us.

The sheer biomass we've removed from the ocean is staggering though, and the
cascading effect on the deep sea ecosystems must be immense. There is so much
less food to fall down there now.

------
meej
A similar phenomenon:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_log](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_log)

~~~
tlavoie
Nurse logs are awesome, and really highlight that circular nature of life.

I'm on the BC coast, with a few acres of mostly-forest, and have some examples
of these right in the yard. Even the stumps of much larger trees logged long
ago, support fair-sized younger trees today.

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popol12
Funny, I watched an episode of « Our planet » called « Deep waters » yesterday
that is quite related to this article. Life at these depths is really
fascinating.

~~~
quickthrowman
Also from the BBC/Attenborough, there’s an episode of _Blue Planet II_ which
shows a whale fall and the subsequent process of consumption by different
species that follows.

I agree, it’s fascinating!

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grenoire
This makes me wonder whether or not by overfishing (and many other economic
activities) at the upper layers of the oceans we have caused significant
ecological destruction at the lower layers. How far does the domino effect go?

~~~
xchaotic
It’s mentioned in TFA - up to 30% of biomass

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xwdv
Is it possible to do falls for other creatures? For example, a Human fall,
where instead of being buried when you die you are lowered into the ocean and
allowed to fall deep into its depths, where you become a new ecosystem.

Or perhaps you wouldn't make it all the way down because you'd get eaten all
at once by some larger creature? Or destroyed by pressure?

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ctoth
I cannot speculate to the author's reason for submitting this article, but it
is interesting to conceptualize our recent civilizational advancements as a
Whale Fall made possible by cheap and abundant energy. What happens when we
run out of whale to eat?

~~~
schoen
I imagine that the submitter, like me, might have heard about it from the link
a few days ago in

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-
slack/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/)

~~~
maze-le
That is exactly the case! I heard the term for the first time in this SSC
article, clicked the Wikipedia link to fulfill my curiosity and was kind of
awe struck by the whole process, so I thought I'd share it here...

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simonkafan
I've never heared of this term before and it's interesting to read people's
interpretation before they knew what it means.

I thought this may be a colloquial expression of IT infrastructure admins when
all their Docker hosts suddenly fail.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I initially thought it might have something to do with _high roller_ [1]
gamblers.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_roller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_roller)

~~~
schwartzworld
or a bowl of petunias thinking "oh no, not again"

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Ha! How did I miss that! Re-watched the original TV series only recently.

------
dang
See also from 2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10657034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10657034)

------
pax
Somebody laid a joke there:

> In the past three years whale fall sites have come under scrutiny, and new
> species have been discovered, _including potential whale fall specialists_

~~~
lukas099
I was confused by this statement at first, too. I thought it meant
'specialists' as in 'scientists who study whale falls'. But I believe it
actually means species that specialize in living in whale falls.

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tsjq
this line is so sad. yet another damage caused by humans:

>It has been suggested that the whaling industry has had an effect on the
biological pump through the elimination of many large whales, reducing the
amount of whale falls. The effects of this on benthic whale fall community
assemblages is not well understood.[24] However, it is suggested that the
removal of large whales might have reduced the total biomass of the deep sea
by more than 30%.[24] Whales stored massive amounts of carbon that were
exported to the deep sea during whale fall events.

>Whaling has thus also reduced the ability of the deep sea to sequester
carbon.[24] Carbon can be sequestered for hundreds to thousands of years in
the deep sea, supporting benthic communities.[24] It is estimated that, in
terms of carbon sequestration, each whale is equivalent to thousands of
trees.[25]

------
mike_n
One reads stories of pork/etc carcasses that aren't being processed right now,
perhaps we could ship those onto barges and into the ocean and dump them
overboard to seed new pockets of offshore life on the sea floor.

~~~
FillardMillmore
How could we dump it to the bottom without surface-dwelling scavengers tearing
through the carcass?

~~~
Drdrdrq
Besides, when does anything that we try to do to improve the nature, actually
help it? Besides limiting our access to it, of course.

~~~
samatman
From what I've been able to gather, scuttling ships to provide artificial
reefs works: it increases the surface area of part of the ocean, which in turn
leads to an increase in bio-density and species variety.

Note that this is a vague impression of a topic I know next to nothing about;
I could easily be wrong here.

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goatherders
That is among the more fascinating things I've read in a long time.

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jondubois
This is just like the economy. When a big economic whale falls, it creates
opportunities for new smaller entities to evolve by feeding on its carcass.

~~~
appleiigs
The govt doesn’t allow economic whales to fall/fail.

~~~
unityByFreedom
It did during the Great Depression. Then it realized that was dumb and it took
a world war to fully recover.

------
parhamn
Very cool. Given the coming monopoly suits, failing businesses and the
political economic discussions, I can see "whale fall" becoming a common
analogy.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=w...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=whale%20fall)

What happened in October 2019?

~~~
blauditore
A whale fall was discovered (top commend in this thread):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZzQhiNQXxU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZzQhiNQXxU)

~~~
leethomas
Thank you, I had recorded the definition of “whale fall” on October 16th last
year in my log book as I had just learned about it, but I couldn’t remember
from where or how.

------
eevilspock
I used to want my body or ashes buried under a newly planted tree.

If it weren't for the expense and trouble this would cause my loved ones, I
would now ask for a burial at sea into the abyss^. So poetic in word and
effect.

^abyssal zone

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mercurialsolo
What's a whale fall equivalent in internet lore? Yahoo?

~~~
asah
old ISPs and social networks, which are recycled for their users.

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amelius
I'm just glad that plastic floats.

~~~
pletnes
Not all plastic does. E.g POM, used in car parts and other durable products.
Mass density ~1.4x water.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyoxymethylene?wprov=sfti1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyoxymethylene?wprov=sfti1)

------
theklub
So if they sink into a trench I wonder if they just completely explode from
the pressure.

~~~
steve_adams_86
If any air was in the lungs it would be replaced with water, otherwise our
bodies wouldn't respond much. We're mostly water and other matter that's very
hard to compress.

------
mongol
I thought first the article would be about the falling whale in Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
Came here having misread the title as "Whale Fail" and thought it would be
about some early days of Twitter where they displayed whales when the server
went down.

But actually learned something very cool!

~~~
Jaruzel
To me, 'Whale Fall' makes think of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, when
the Heart of Gold invokes it's infinite improbability drive to avoid incoming
missiles and said missiles turn into a pot of Petunias and a Whale, with both
then falling towards the nearby planet at high speed[1].

\--

[1] 'I wonder if it [the planet] will be friends with me?', thought the Whale.

~~~
dylan604
"Oh no, not again!" To this day, I still wonder why the bowl of petunias
thought that

~~~
objclxt
> I still wonder why the bowl of petunias thought that

It’s covered in the third book! (Life, the Universe, and Everything)

~~~
Drdrdrq
It is an incredible set of books. You can return to it years later and find
jokes and references that you missed in first... few hundred readings (don't
judge me :) ).

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SydneyPumpkin
Whale fall = bitcoin jargon for large market swings

~~~
octocop
The word whale is pretty common in econ slang

~~~
SydneyPumpkin
Don't understand why people are down voting me for this... No sense of humor
in HNews...

------
joyj2nd
Here you see an animation of a falling whale... [https://giphy.com/gifs/fat-
anS1ZNfpzXSjm](https://giphy.com/gifs/fat-anS1ZNfpzXSjm)

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unityByFreedom
I don’t get it, why is a wiki article #1 on HN?

~~~
ddevault
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
> more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
> answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

From
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Note that, in general, comments like yours are not appreciated here.

~~~
gus_massa
I agree. From a recent comment of dang:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22990237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22990237)

> _A Wikipedia link to something obscure, which most readers won 't have heard
> of before, about which there isn't necessarily a good general-purpose
> article or blog post out there, can be a great HN submission._

~~~
dang
See also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117614](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117614)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089041).

~~~
unityByFreedom
Thanks, I appreciate your effort to encourage productive conversation.

