[vimeo width=”680″ height=”400″]http://vimeo.com/29987934[/vimeo]
It is intuitive and obvious that an animal as large as a whale would be important to marine ecosystems when they are alive, requiring tons of food per day to stay alive, but the body of a whale is just as long lived when it dies. Nothing is wasted in nature, and this is even more true of the tonnage of nutrients locked inside the body of a whale after it dies. When the body of a large dead whale falls to the ocean bottom, it starts off a small ecosystem of its own, with a noticeable succession of marine creatures living on and around the whale fall. This cute animation shows that progress of marine creatures taking their turn at making a life from the death of a whale.