Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:When a large marine mammal like a whale dies, its body drifts to the ocean floor in a process known as whale fall. For more than a decade, a succession of sea creatures will live off of the whale’s body by stripping it and burrowing into the bones to find nutrients. The whale’s decomposing body is located at what is called the Clayoquot Slope Bullseye site, where Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) scientists monitor methane gas escaping the seafloor. In 2012 and 2020, ONC scientists took brief detours to revisited the site—located some 4,100 feet below the ocean’s surface—to document the growing sea community living among the whale’s skeleton. In the depths of the ocean, as well as in every other ecosystem across the world, death is a beginning.