AllFreeNovel
Share Us
What sort of life made its home at these crushing depths?
She knew one way to find out and glanced to Bryan. “How much farther is one of the landers? I’d love to deploy a bait box and lure life out of the forest.”
He checked a sonar scope. Three lights glowed atop a bathymetric chart. “Louieis half a klick ahead,” he reported. “It lies along the path to the wrecked submarine. But I don’t think you’ll have to wait that long to cast out bait.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
Bryan goosed the thrusters to lift them higher as they approached a dark hillock in the canopy—only it wasn’t part of the forest.
“Whale fall ahead,” the pilot reported.
Datuk and Monk both shifted to peer over their shoulders.
“What’s that?” Monk asked.
“Just what it sounds like,” Phoebe answered. “Dead whales often sink to the bottom of the ocean, becoming a great banquet for deep-sea life.”
As theCormorantapproached, Phoebe made sure the external 4K cameras were recording everything. The dark hill soon materialized into the bulk of a sperm whale. It lay on its side atop the forest. Even its great weight had failed to crash through the canopy.
Like any whale fall, it had become a feast for life down here, a bounty dropped into these nutrient-starved depths. Half the carcass had already been scoured, exposing arcs of white rib and lengths of jaw bones. Life scurried and thrashed over the remains: picking and tearing, snipping and worming.
“What the hell?” Monk asked. “Do you normally find so many creatures down here?”
“Yes,” Phoebe whispered in awe. “And no.”
Monk gaped past her shoulder. “What do you mean?”
She pointed to a herd of large corpse-white crustaceans as they ripped into the flesh. They looked like a cross between a lobster and a shrimp. Long antennae waved in front of them.
“Those are amphipods. They’ve been spotted in deep trenches, capable of surviving at these depths. Their shallow-water counterparts seldom grow larger than your thumbnail. In deep trenches, they can grow to a foot long.”
Monk shook his head. “Those giants out there are ayardacross.”
She nodded. “As I said,yes, creatures like this can be found down here—butno, never this size.”
One of the amphipods curled its carapace into a ball—much like pill bugs, their distant cousins—and rolled down the flank of the whale.
“It’s like something out of a nightmare.” Adam pointed at a bright red crab that stalked over the hummock of decaying flesh. It towered high on jointed legs that stretched fifteen feet across. “Is that creature oversize, too?”
“Actually, no,” Phoebe said. “That’sMacrocheira kaempferi. A Japanese spider crab. They’ve never been reported at these depths. But then again, less than one percent of these deep ocean trenches have ever been seen by any eyes—human or robotic.”
She watched a large stingray sweep over the hump of the whale. It stretched six feet wide and twice again in length if you counted its barbed tail.
Elsewhere, a colony of octopuses—normally solitary creatures—fought and writhed inside the hollowed-out carcass. She recognized them.Enteroctopus dofleini—the giant Pacific octopus. They stretched thirty feet long, massing seven-hundred pounds each.
She shook her head in both disbelief and wonder.
How were they surviving down here?
She knew deep-sea trenches functioned like solitary islands. They were so remote and inhospitable that life could not move between them, which meant species were forced to adapt to each locale where they were trapped.
And this is as unique as you could get.
The creatures, isolated here, must have developed their own adaptation strategies to contend with the extreme pressure.
As if proving this, a lone squid rose into view, swelling even larger as it staked its territory. It was a massive specimen ofMesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, the Colossal Squid. Easily a ton in weight. Its eyes were black dinnerplates, softly aglow from the luminous photophores around its lenses. Likewise, trickles of bright blue phosphorescence traced its limbs in a threatening lightshow.
As they glided past, Phoebe wondered if some of the shine of the coral forest came from bioluminescent creatures like this who made it their home.
