The spacing of them and the specialization of scavengers is surprising.
When I woke up this morning, I had no idea that deep sea whale carcases would constitute an entire hidden global ecosystem, but that's just another day on HN I guess.
I had the same thought, which made me think how little we know about the ecosystems on earth, which made me think it's even more important to protect the environment. We destroy things before we even know they exist.
I get conflicting thoughts about this. Sometimes I feel we must have killed countless deep sea dwelling species without ever seeing them. Then sometimes I'm amazed by the resilience and scale of the ocean and wonder if somehow, very few species have gone extinct because of us.
The sheer biomass we've removed from the ocean is staggering though, and the cascading effect on the deep sea ecosystems must be immense. There is so much less food to fall down there now.
When I woke up this morning, I had no idea that deep sea whale carcases would constitute an entire hidden global ecosystem, but that's just another day on HN I guess.