Happy birthday, pop!
The rest of this post leans morbid. I’m saving the pictures for after the jump, because they’re a little gross. But, last summer a 41-foot humpback whale carcass washed up on one of the shores in the park. All summer, it fed bears, wolves, and a whole lot of other animals. And then, it disappeared. And then it reappeared. On a different shore across the bay. We went by to take a look yesterday.
This is the picture I took:
And this is a picture from last summer that the park took with one of the hidden cameras they had set up to watch the animals:
Apparently, the wolves and the bears (up to six at a time) got along just fine in the presence of such abundant food.
Another little tidbit I learned about whale carcasses last week: Hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean support pretty complex communities, but they only last a short while because of shifts in geological activity. So, we think that whale carcasses, which sink to the bottom of the ocean (how did this one wash up on shore then??) can act as stepping stones, supporting organisms temporarily on their way from one hydrothermal vent to another.
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