title: Whale-fall ecosystems: recent insights into ecology, paleoecology, and evolution.
abstract: Whale falls produce remarkable organic- and sulfide-rich habitat islands at the seafloor. The past decade has seen a dramatic increase in studies of modern and fossil whale remains, yielding exciting new insights into whale-fall ecosystems. Giant body sizes and especially high bone-lipid content allow great-whale carcasses to support a sequence of heterotrophic and chemosynthetic microbial assemblages in the energy-poor deep sea. Deep-sea metazoan communities at whale falls pass through a series of overlapping successional stages that vary with carcass size, water depth, and environmental conditions. These metazoan communities contain many new species and evolutionary novelties, including bone-eating worms and snails and a diversity of grazers on sulfur bacteria. Molecular and paleoecological studies suggest that whale falls have served as hot spots of adaptive radiation for a specialized fauna; they have also provided evolutionary stepping stones for vent and seep mussels and could have facilitated speciation in other vent/seep taxa.
authors.affiliation: Department of Oceanography, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822; email: craig.smith@hawaii.edu , divaamon@hawaii.edu.
authors.forename: Craig R
authors.initials: CR
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.forename: Adrian G
authors.initials: AG
authors.lastname: Glover
authors.forename: Tina
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Treude
authors.forename: Nicholas D
authors.initials: ND
authors.lastname: Higgs
authors.forename: Diva J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Amon
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D059001:Aquatic Organisms / Q000254:growth & development / Q000502:physiology*; D005075:Biological Evolution; D017753:Ecosystem; D005247:Feeding Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D020387:Food Chain; D005580:Fossils; D019015:Geologic Sediments / Q000737:chemistry / Q000382:microbiology; D009792:Oceans and Seas; D010163:Paleontology; D010802:Phylogeny; D013045:Species Specificity; D014871:Water Microbiology; D014907:Whales
keywords: Osedax; chemosynthesis; ecological succession; speciation; sulfate reduction; vent/seep faunas