More Whale Falls Found off Los Angeles than in the Rest of the World Combined

A pair of scientific surveys recently turned up a few surprises on the seafloor off the coast of Los Angeles, California. First, there were the tens of thousands of naval weapons. And then, researchers found the remains of whales—seven confirmed and almost certainly more than 60 total skeletons in the dark depths, a phenomenon known as “whale fall.”

Eric Terrill and Sophia Merrifield, oceanographers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego who led the surveys in 2021 and 2023, had set out to assess waste scattered across 350 square kilometers of seafloor encompassing the San Pedro Basin and part of the Santa Monica Basin. The area—twice the size of Washington, DC, and centered about 25 kilometers offshore—was used as an industrial dumping ground in the early- to mid-1900s. A large number of the objects the survey found turned out to be barrels containing the banned pesticide DDT and its toxic byproducts.

Before this effort, scientists had found only about 50 whale falls in all the world’s oceans since 1977, when a deep sea naval vessel spotted the first specimen off nearby Santa Catalina Island. When these large marine mammals die and sink, they form biological oases on the resource-poor seafloor. Whale falls provide nourishment and even habitat for a wide range of creatures—from scavenging hagfish and sleeper sharks to microbes, mussels, clams, worms, nematodes, crabs, and members of the jellyfish family.

Greg Rouse, a marine biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who helped with the surveys, says that the remains belong to gray, blue, humpback, fin, sperm, and minke whales.

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