And the dying too
Dear Jolene,
Sometimes water lets us see the living. Other times water brings us the dying and the dead.
I came upon this whale's carcass in the Kenai fjords of Alaska, not even an hour before I witnessed a pod of over ten very alive humpback whales cooperatively bubble net feeding which became the heartbeat of my film Aquaphoria.
But this one haunts me still, a year later. Who was this whale? We did not pause to ask.
The death of a great whale signifies a profound loss, not only for the species but for the specific community of cephalopods who socialized with this individual. How did this intelligent mammal meet its end? Was its death violent and painful? Was it caused by human interference in the world -- by shipping, or fishing, or pollution, or swallowed plastic, or a change in the volume or location of its food? I would later spent time in the company of scientists who would know how to conduct a necropsy to find answers to questions like these. But on this day, only my and other tourists' cell phone cameras were there to register the whale's death.
I feel like we should experience the death of every great whale as a tragedy, for to be in the presence of such creatures—like a redwood tree, a raven, or a small crab with a shell on its back—is to understand that we, all the living and dying organisms on earth, are all connected. You've no doubt heard of the Orca off the coast of British Columbia carrying the body of her dead calf for seventeen days in 2018, and who did so again in January of this year (Charlebois 2025). Humpback whales are known to compose special songs for their companions that have been beached.
We created an entire digital world to hold our own mourning, Memory Eternal, that memorialized what was otherwise truncated grieving. I wonder if it's possible to hear whales mourning their loved ones in this web of hydrophones. With what ears could we observe loss, in their already haunting and mournful songs? So much of this world is beyond our perception and understanding; we must be humbled. I'm listening for the sounds of dying that I realize, wearing my ears of doom. What happens if I put on different ears, to hear for whale joy.
When a great whale dies and sinks beyond the photic zone, it delivers an extraordinary pulse of energy to one of Earth’s most food‑limited realms. A single 30‑ to 40‑ton carcass supplies roughly two tonnes of organic carbon—equivalent to a century or more of the “marine snow” that would normally settle on the same patch. Within hours, scavengers such as sleeper sharks, hagfish, and amphipods converge to strip away soft tissue at rates that can top 60 kilograms per day. Once the flesh is gone, the surrounding sediment becomes an oasis for dense swarms of worms, crustaceans, and snails that thrive on leftover scraps and on bacterial films fed by dissolved nutrients.
The bones themselves, rich in lipids, sustain a much longer “sulphophilic” phase--an anaerobic process that fuels deep-sea communities. Anaerobic microbes inside the skeleton break down fats and leach hydrogen sulfide, fuelling chemosynthetic communities of mussels, clams, limpets, and the remarkable Osedax “bone‑eating” worms. This stage can last half a century, supporting hundreds of species—dozens of them seemingly specialised for life on whale falls—and linking the ecology of carcasses to that of hydrothermal vents and cold seeps. Even after the lipids are exhausted, the mineralised framework endures as a hard substrate for filter‑feeding corals and sponges, extending the carcass’s ecological legacy for decades more. In this way, a single whale sustains tens of thousands of individual organisms, acts as a stepping‑stone for deep‑sea dispersal, and sequesters carbon on the seafloor long after its life at the surface has ended.
This is not to make any apologies for the death of this whale, the cause of which remains unknown, and possibly unknowable. Rather, it serves to highlight those beings that are not visible to us on a gas-powered boat, reminding us that we feel everything and know little. And that's why humans need to be curious, open, as they grieve what they see and what they've done and can't yet see. Grieving, in its most profound sense, is not just a personal or collective mourning but also an act of remembrance. The whale’s death, as with the passing of any majestic creature, calls us to reckon with what we have lost—not just in the individual but in the larger, interconnected web of life.
Sources
Charlebois, Brieanna. 2025. “In Deep Mourning, Famous Orca Mom Drapes Her Dead Calf over Her Head, Again: Experts.” Vancouver Sun, January 2, 2025. https://vancouversun.com/news/famous-orca-mother-dead-calf-grief-researchers.
