Robert Ballard and the Nautilus Live expedition is over half way through their six-month 2015 season and recently they revisited the Rosebud whale fall from 2011. The finback whale carcass was originally deposited on the ocean floor off San Diego after being struck by a ship and killed. The opportunity to study a whale carcass at depth was, and still is, rare and exciting.

“In the years since, research vessels operated by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute have returned to the site twice and discovered remarkable communities of life supported by the whale fall, perhaps most notably including the Osedax worm, a species that lives exclusively entrenched inside whale bones. The Osedax (latin for bone eater) rely on a symbiotic bacteria that allow them to digest the proteins and lipids of the whale bones for subsistence.”

See more imagery here.