Whale graveyard teeming with life deep below surface of Pacific Ocean
As they sail along the southern California coast, a team aboard the Exploration Vehicle Nautilus has been checking out the carcass of a whale sunken deep to the bottom of the ocean.
Named Rosebud, the carcass is what's left of a finback whale that was struck and killed by a ship in 2011 near San Diego. The skeletal remains are also known as a "whale fall" in oceanographic parlance and constitute a rare sight in open waters, according to Nautilus Live.
When this whale died, researchers in the San Diego area came together to have a necropsy conducted and to have the carcass towed out to sea.
In the four years since then, the carcass has spawned "communities of life," including the Osedax worm, which lives only inside whale bones, the Nautilus team said in a July 31 update from the ship.
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