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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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[1] 'I wonder if it [the planet] will be friends with me?', thought the Whale.
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 :) ).
Because Arthur Dent keeps killing Agrajag over and over again and he reincarnates into various people and creatures that then are killed by Arthur. The pot of petunias is one such reincarnation.
The entire character arc is basically Douglas Adams taking out his frustration with Jaguar drivers in traffic.
In Dark Star a sentient bomb gets stuck in the drop mechanism. One of the crew teaches it existentialism in an attempt to stop it detonating, but then it comes to believe its the only being in the universe and decided “Let there be light”.
While the sibling comment correctly points out Dark Star as the movie, I'd also like to point out Starship Titanic - Douglas Adams was involved in the game, based on a throwaway line from one of the Hitchhiker novels. Terry Jones novelized the game. Both include a talking bomb where the plot involves distracting the bomb until it looses track and has to start counting down all over again.
I thought the same, but went back further in time to the live-ish news report of the demolition team trying to vaporize a dead beached whale back into the ocean using construction dynamite.
Here's what a "Whale Fail" is [1]. In 1970, a whale died near Portland, Oregon and washed up on the beach. The local authorities decided to blow it up using explosives, with awful and unexpected results.
Twitter sunk all those countless fail whales only to provide a perfect habitat and breeding ground for scavengers and bottom feeders. What a perfect metaphor.
> 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.
> 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.
Proximately, because it's really interesting. A step beyond that whale falls were mentioned in a good recent SSC post on slack using them as an example of a situation where suddenly there's a lot of slack in some creatures' existences.
I don't think this post deserves downvotes because it is a good question.
I think few people really think of what happens when a whale dies over deep ocean. It apparently has huge nonlinear effects. That is pretty cool in its own right, but there are some practical reasons why many HN readers may like this.
Most of us working in areas where there is a complex interplay of technology, competition, big economic actors, small economic actors, evolutionary incentives, multiscale processes, etc. Whale falls map just enough on what we do such that it is a fresh starting point in thinking about the enterprises and industries in which we work, and just imprecisely enough such that it can spark some new thinking about things that we are working on that we might have missed before.
I used to work for a multibillion dollar enterprise that is averse to public embarrassment. Already I am re-thinking of what really happens when a dying megaproject is sent off to quietly die without canning all of the people, some of which are actually talented and creative.
I almost knee jerk downvoted you, then decided to give you the benefit of the doubt. You should know, that if a wiki article makes it to the front page on HN, then it is almost guaranteed to be interesting. My experience is that more often than not it was worth at least reading the first paragraph.
HN is a place I turn to to feed my curiosity, and really appreciate that it’s not just tech/startup content that makes it’s way here.
Other commenters gave great answers, but I'll add that a comment like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23212386 on a submission is a good sign, since it shows just the sort of intellectual curiosity-gratification HN exists for.
This would be really neat if it actually happened!
I think we usually see two distinct failure modes; either a company rots from the inside and loses a significant portion of its peak value before finally succumbing to an acquisition, at which point the single acquirer picks their bones dry. Or a massive company fails in a spectacular fashion, like we might see with some airlines in the next few months, but isn’t it also true that either they will restructure in bankruptcy or a large single competitor will come and sweep them up?
I guess the difference is that there’s nothing in the ocean that can devour a whale in one bite, the only option is for many very smaller creatures to feast on it over a long time period. TFA also mentions a crucial factor is the whale needs to fall in the deep sea, coastal water falls don’t result in the same effect. What would be the analogy for the deep sea effect — to preserve the company over time to allow the smaller entities to “feed” on it?
If there was a way to better emulate the natural effect I think it would be hugely beneficial to market diversity and competition. I think markets continue to evolve in ways that support and encourage monoliths. This long-term trend has just been massively accelerated over the last couple months.
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.
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?
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]
Very cool. Given the coming monopoly suits, failing businesses and the political economic discussions, I can see "whale fall" becoming a common analogy.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
That's somewhat fatalistic and cynical, but there's a kernel of truth in your sentiment. We have of course done good and meaningful work when it comes to environmental protections and preservation - sure, we could argue that perhaps we haven't done enough and should do more, but the effort is there.
I'm not sure if our primary goal in "improving nature" is to help "nature" or simply keep nature sustainable for humans and future humans.
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.
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?
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...
118 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadI agree, it’s fascinating!
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.
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.
OTOH ... awesome article - thanks for sharing!
But actually learned something very cool!
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[1] 'I wonder if it [the planet] will be friends with me?', thought the Whale.
It’s covered in the third book! (Life, the Universe, and Everything)
The entire character arc is basically Douglas Adams taking out his frustration with Jaguar drivers in traffic.
It didn't go well. Classic news blurb though.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBgThvB_IDQ
Osedax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osedax
Thanks for the video!
https://youtu.be/4r7wHMg5Yjg
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Note that, in general, comments like yours are not appreciated here.
> 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.
[1]https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Which was the first thing to come to mind when I saw this post
I think few people really think of what happens when a whale dies over deep ocean. It apparently has huge nonlinear effects. That is pretty cool in its own right, but there are some practical reasons why many HN readers may like this.
Most of us working in areas where there is a complex interplay of technology, competition, big economic actors, small economic actors, evolutionary incentives, multiscale processes, etc. Whale falls map just enough on what we do such that it is a fresh starting point in thinking about the enterprises and industries in which we work, and just imprecisely enough such that it can spark some new thinking about things that we are working on that we might have missed before.
I used to work for a multibillion dollar enterprise that is averse to public embarrassment. Already I am re-thinking of what really happens when a dying megaproject is sent off to quietly die without canning all of the people, some of which are actually talented and creative.
HN is a place I turn to to feed my curiosity, and really appreciate that it’s not just tech/startup content that makes it’s way here.
There was a similar-but-different discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23087284 if anyone wants more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyoxymethylene?wprov=sfti1
I think we usually see two distinct failure modes; either a company rots from the inside and loses a significant portion of its peak value before finally succumbing to an acquisition, at which point the single acquirer picks their bones dry. Or a massive company fails in a spectacular fashion, like we might see with some airlines in the next few months, but isn’t it also true that either they will restructure in bankruptcy or a large single competitor will come and sweep them up?
I guess the difference is that there’s nothing in the ocean that can devour a whale in one bite, the only option is for many very smaller creatures to feast on it over a long time period. TFA also mentions a crucial factor is the whale needs to fall in the deep sea, coastal water falls don’t result in the same effect. What would be the analogy for the deep sea effect — to preserve the company over time to allow the smaller entities to “feed” on it?
If there was a way to better emulate the natural effect I think it would be hugely beneficial to market diversity and competition. I think markets continue to evolve in ways that support and encourage monoliths. This long-term trend has just been massively accelerated over the last couple months.
> In the past three years whale fall sites have come under scrutiny, and new species have been discovered, including potential whale fall specialists
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]
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=w...
What happened in October 2019?
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?
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
[1] Hvalreki (whale drift) in Icelandic law, from Jónsbók in 1281: https://www.althingi.is/lagas/150b/1281000.401.html
I'm not sure if our primary goal in "improving nature" is to help "nature" or simply keep nature sustainable for humans and future humans.
Note that this is a vague impression of a topic I know next to nothing about; I could easily be wrong here.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
I thought this may be a colloquial expression of IT infrastructure admins when all their Docker hosts suddenly fail.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_roller