The discovery of a natural whale fall in the Antarctic deep sea

Large cetacean carcasses at the deep-sea floor, known as 'whale falls', provide a resource for generalist-scavenging species, chemosynthetic fauna related to those from hydrothermal vents and cold seeps, and remarkable bone-specialist species such as Osedax worms. Here we report the serendipitous discovery of a late-stage natural whale fall at a depth of 1444. m in the South Sandwich Arc. This discovery represents the first natural whale fall to be encountered in the Southern Ocean, where cetaceans are abundant. The skeleton was situated within a seafloor caldera, in close proximity (