Speaking of whalefalls, there are an estimated half a million of them littering the floors of the abysses at any given time, they last decades each and they’re an average of less than ten miles apart, even with slightly fewer whales alive today than in the past. Back when the ocean was filled with giant prehistoric predators fighting it out, not to mention dinosaurs from land probably washing out to sea, there had to be many times the giant corpses down there. The abyss would have had to be like mountains of rotting reptiles, wouldn’t it???!
So, here’s my thinking. First: Deep-sea gigantism is a very real thing–ironically enough, the heavier the pressure, the bigger things tend to get, because it’s smarter to be soft and malleable than tiny and bony at that point, and larger surface area = more spread-out pressure.
Second: Bogleech is absolutely right that logically the carnage of the various epochs before us must have turned places like the Marianas Trench into a necropolis where the assorted detritivores feasted like nothing we’ve ever seen before.
Third: People want to believe that the deep-seas is capable of hosting monsters like megalodons.
Now, I’m no big-city Monterey Bay marine biologist specializing in deep-sea autonomous exploration vessels. But I feel as though the layman focuses heavily on the megalodon, who we actually are 99.9% sure definitely must be extinct because we can track how prey reacts to predator and the math just doesn’t add up to it still being around affecting populations.
But that doesn’t mean there can’t be monsters down there. Think of the style of predator a megalodon was: Viciously active, constantly seeking and hunting down its meals. Powerful muscles built for swimming long distances and speedy on top of it. The ocean is big but we’d definitely have seen evidence of them like, directly, even beyond just “whales don’t act how they would”. That sort of lifestyle lives to be noticed.
You know what I’ve thought for a while? How much deeper the abyss goes beneath the sea floor. Don’t you think it must be impossible for there not to be subterranean species in the abyss? Much of the sea floor is made up of marine snow, tiny flakes of dead bodies and remains. Shouldn’t there be detritivores feasting beneath the skin of the world? Sure, a whalefall is a bounty for decades, but that’s like resting an apple on top of a picnic table where your city is made of meat. And it’s already difficult to try and observe life that far down underwater–to the best of my knowledge we haven’t even tried burrowing down deeper and seeing what we can find.
All this is to say that with all of this combined, a part of me wonders if sea serpents might exist after all down there. Specifically, a part of me wonders how many whalefalls we don’t know about because something got there first. Something perhaps like a horrific burrowing nightmare predator such as a deep sea gigantified Bobbit worm.
That’s all. :)
I would like to remind everyone reading this that Bobbit worms are already known to get up to ten feet (3m) long.
That said, I’m not sure how effectively something truly gargantuan would be able to Shai Hulud its way through the abyssopelagic muck.
So. If we’re talking about the ancient ocean, it should be mentioned that the asteroid that killed of the dinosaurs also set in motion a number of climate changes that resulted in net dissolved oceanic oxygen levels going up by, um, a lot.
The Dinosaurs were indisputably titans on land, but the Jurassic-Cretaceous ocean was relatively anoxic compared to the Holocene seas, and most of the large marine life was confined to relatively warm, shallow seas such as the one that once resided over the current Great Plains of the USA.
Whales include the largest animals ever. Before the Age of Whaling, when whale populations were at their peaks, would have been the period of time when this decaying “skin” of abyssal biomass would have been thickest.
Within written history.
If. If there ever were gigantic abyssal detrivores (like the one’s we’re speculating about) they would have been contemporaneous with the ancient tales of sea serpents.
Shit. They might still be around.
I HAVE MORE TO SAY
Ahem
Didja ever wonder where Fossil Fuels actually come from?
So I mentioned that the dinosaur-era ocean was anoxic?
It was so anoxic that the only life in the abyssopelagic seas was sulfur reducing bacteria.
Everything multicellular was near the surface, in those shallow seas I mentioned.
Turns out, with no arctic poles (they were subtropical at the time) you don’t get any arctic storms churning up the water and mixing a fuckton of air into the ocean
These arctic poles also drive long range circulatory currents that help move that oxygen around.
So hundreds of millions of years of marine snow just… sat there. Not decomposing. Not getting eaten. Just slowly compressed under the weight of millions of years.
The absolute feeding frenzy that must have ensued once oxygen rolled through those depths! The scale of the putrefaction! It defies comprehension! It defies imagination!
But yea that’s where gas comes from. Jurassic marine snow. TMYK.
