Deep-sea food bonanzas: early Cenozoic whale-fall communities resemble wood-fall rather than seep communities.
The evolutionary history of invertebrate communities utilizing whale carcasses and sunken wood in the deep-sea is explored using fossil evidence. Compared to modern whale-fall communities, the Eo-Oligocene examples lack those vent-type taxa that most heavily rely on sulphide produced by anaerobic breakdown of bone lipids, but are very similar in their trophic structure to contemporaneous wood-falls. This sheds doubt on the hypothesis that whale-falls were evolutionary stepping stones for taxa that now inhabit hydrothermal vents and seeps. We suggest that the whale-fall communities reported here represent a new ecologic stage among whale-falls, which we have coined the 'chemosymbiotic opportunist stage' and that the 'sulphophilic stage' of modern whale-falls developed during the Early Miocene, resulting from a significant increase in both body size and/or oil content of bones among cetaceans during this time.
Kiel
Steffen
S
School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK. kiels@si.edu
Goedert
James L
JL
D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D017753:Ecosystem; D005247:Feeding Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D020387:Food Chain; D005580:Fossils; D007448:Invertebrates / Q000502:physiology*; D010140:Pacific Ocean; D013045:Species Specificity; D014907:Whales