Collection 4: "Living in the Dark" by Cheryl Bardoe

It plunges 700 feet (200 meters) through the ocean’s top layer, the warm “sunlight zone” where algae kick-start life’s food chain with photosynthesis.

This cache of resources, called a whale fall, will become the center of a unique habitat.

Hagfish—unsightly creatures also called slime eels—wriggle inside the carcass and begin to eat it from the inside out.

Squat lobsters, sleeper sharks, and crabs tear at the whale’s flesh and scatter crumbs into nearby sediments.

Meanwhile, fantastical worms, slugs, and bacteria bore into the whale’s bones to feast on fatty marrow.

The living things that take up residence on this whale fall are similar to those that live near undersea geysers (called hydrothermal vents) or cracks that leak natural gas into the ocean (called cold seeps).

In the 1840s, British naturalist Edward Forbes dredged the Aegean Sea
100 times to find out.

In the 1840s, British naturalist Edward Forbes dredged the Aegean Sea
100 times to find out.

But scientists assumed that life forms living off such scraps would
be meager.

You can often find undersea volcanic activity where Earth’s tectonic plates are pulling apart.

These chemosynthetic bacteria may be food for other creatures themselves, or may live in symbiosis with other deep-sea dwellers.

Hydrothermal vents have been a constant source of surprises, ranging from the single-celled microbe that actually lives inside a vent (and tolerates temperatures of 250 degrees Fahrenheit, or 120 degrees Celsius) to the white crab with such furry arms that it was dubbed the “yeti crab.”

Crabs and shrimp come to scavenge dead bacteria, and mussels arrive that live with symbiotic bacteria.

In death, these fats are decomposed by bacteria that give off hydrogen
sulfide—sound familiar?

But on this expedition, Herrera says, “we were never bored because we were constantly seeing amazing species. We suspect this is one of the areas of
highest biodiversity on Earth.”