Name: The Creepy Creatures That Feast On Dead Whales
Uploaded: 2025-12-27T17:00:24.000Z
Duration: 4 min 16 s
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This is a dead whale, which scientists recently discovered at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Covered in all kinds of creatures, from bone eating worms to deep sea octopuses.

The bottom of the ocean is a desolate place.

Normally, the only food you'll find there is what's called marine snow.

Tiny specks of organic material falling from the surface.

And that's why there aren't many critters crawling or swimming at the bottom.

But once in a while, the stuff falling from above is a lot bigger.

Whales, of course, are enormous, weighing up to 180 metric tons.

So when they fall to the bottom, they can sustain entire eco systems for years.

Just think the amount of calories in a whale here.

I mean, the equivalent of so much marine snow, it's hard to even compare.

That's one of the 31 scientists aboard the exploration vessel Nautilus, a ship that explores the sea floor.

In the fall of 2019, the crew came across this baleen whale more than 3,000 meters down.

And by the time they arrived, it was overrun with octopuses.

More specifically, moose, Octopus robustus, a little known purplish species that inhabits the deep sea.

What's strange is that octopuses are predators.

They don't usually eat dead tissue, which is why experts think they were feasting on other critters on top of the whale carcass, such as crustaceans or snails.

They likely use the suckers on their tentacles to pick up their prey and then carefully transfer them from sucker to sucker into their mouths.

But if those octopuses look eerie to you, wait until you learn about the bone eating worms called Osedax.

There are so many of them here that it looks like the whale skeleton is coated in algae.

Instead, they secrete acid to dissolve bone, and

then they rely on bacteria to do the rest of the.

So these are worms that have symbiotic associations with bacteria.

Instead, they have these rootlets that burrow into the bone, and

then the bacteria are able to metabolize the fats and oils that are in the bone itself.

In other words, they basically outsource digestion.

You'll also notice some eel like creatures swimming around.

And as it turns out, they're not actually eels, but

likely long bodied fish known as eelpouts, which have a taste for decaying whale blubber.

We saw one or two in particular grab onto flesh and do what we were calling an alligator roll, spinning around to twist off pieces of flesh.

The researchers also saw other kinds of worms, crabs and a plump lobster, which they joked may have been fat from feeding on the whale.

He was a little lethargic and maybe not going to swim away too fast.

In fact, a lot of these animals look pretty full.

You just gotta sit on the sofa for a while.

With so many animals feeding on the carcass, it can degrade in less than a decade.

And considering how vast the ocean is, stumbling on one only months after it died is really lucky.

Whale falls are very rare, relatively, and the chance encounter like this was really important for science.

For example, it will help researchers better understand these elusive deep sea animals, like those bone eating worms, which is one reason why they were so excited.

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The Creepy Creatures That Feast On Dead Whales

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