| | Bigger is Better: The Role of Whales as Detritus in Marine |
| | 0,67 | | MB | Ecosystems |
| | 46 | | stron |
| | 4856 | | ID | University of Hawaii at Manoa |
| | 2005 | | rok |
| | Abstract. Dead whales are the largest, most food-rich detrital particles in the ocean, typically |
| | containing >10^6 g of organic carbon in energy-rich lipids and proteins. Most whales suffering natural |
| | mortality appear to sink rapidly to the deep-sea floor, with little loss of tissue during transit. |
| | Although whale detritus constitutes a small proportion of total organic flux to the deep sea, whale |
| | falls provide energy-rich habitat islands that are frequent on regional scales (e.g., with a mean |
| | nearest neighbor distance of <16 km in the northeast Pacific). Experimental studies on the |
| | California slope demonstrate that deep-sea whale falls support a succession of diverse |
| | macrofaunal assemblages, characterized in sequence by (1) mobile scavengers, (2) enrichment |
| | opportunists, and (3) sulfophiles (including chemoautotrophs); the entire successional process lasts |
| | for decades on large carcasses. The enrichment-opportunist and mobile-scavenger stages harbor at |
| | least 32 species that appear to be whale-fall specialists. Whale detritus in pelagic, continental |
| | shelf, and intertidal ecosystems does not appear to be a significant source of energy or habitat for |
| | novel animals, although some mobile, intertidal scavengers (e.g., polar bears), may obtain |
| | significant energetic benefits from whale carrion. Commercial whaling drastically reduced the |
| | occurrence of detrital whales in all marine ecosystems, and is likely to have caused substantial |
| | species extinction in deep-sea whale-fall assemblages due to loss of 65-90% of the whale-fall |
| | habitat. The species extinctions were likely most severe in the North Atlantic where whales were |
| | decimated in the 1800’s, and may be ongoing in the Southern Ocean and northeast Pacific, where |
| | intense whaling occurred into the 1960’s and 1970’s. Whaling may also have caused a decline in |
| | highly mobile coastal scavengers, in particular the California condor, that depended on stranded- |
| | whale carrion. Experimental implantation of lipid-rich, whale-bone packages in a variety of ocean |
| | basins could help to determine whether whaling induced extinctions have modulated biodiversity |
| | levels of whale-fall communities. |