In winter 2010, Adrian Glover, a marine biologist from the Natural History Museum in London, got a call from a colleague with some good news. While piloting a remotely operated vehicle to study a hydrothermal vent 4,700 feet beneath the surface of the Antarctic’s Scotia Sea, his friend had stumbled across something unexpected: the skeleton of an Antarctic minke whale.
Rather than being a scene of death, the carcass was an oasis of life in the dark and inhospitable remote sea. Snails, worms, mollusks and white mats of bacteria were feasting on what remained of the massive mammal. Glover asked his friend to bring home a piece of this treasure.
While inspecting the bones in his lab, he discovered nine new species of worms and bacteria. These rare, relatively unexplored, deep-sea ecosystems — lively communities that spring up around dead cetaceans that sink to the seafloor — are called whale ...
