Scapular Surface

On the seafloor off Santa Catalina, a whale fall had been submerged for more than fifty years by the time it was sampled. That is a long time, yet what the scapula yielded was only the surface of this moment: microbial mats and animals living on chemical energy were limited in distribution, while suspension feeders attached to it were more numerous. From these signs, the researchers cautiously inferred that this bone might be approaching an early reef-like state. Its lipid content was lower than that of the more lipid-rich caudal vertebrae, which was also listed as one possible reason the shift may have occurred earlier. No one watched it continuously from the moment the first mouthful of carrion was carried away until it became what it is today; what lies before us are only the organisms that remain, sparse traces, and the still-usable material within the bone. A single sampling can support cautious retroactive inference, but it can also tempt the eye to fill the unseen years into a sequence.

Soft tissue remains.

Another whale fall in Antarctica still retained residual soft tissue, and typical scavenging amphipods were also recorded at the site. Researchers had already placed this whale fall in the late enrichment stage. That judgment summarizes the dominant condition at the moment of sampling; yet once it enters narration, readers easily come to expect an already completed handoff: the soft parts are consumed, the animals dependent on them depart, and the bone surface then bears another assemblage of life. Such a sequence is easy to tell, and it makes decades seem readable straight through. But the Antarctic remnants have not receded into backstory, and the amphipods have not exited according to that order. The difference between scapula and caudal vertebrae is real, but to translate that difference too quickly into periods each one possesses is to complete, on the site’s behalf, a separation that has not yet been completed. If one instead says that all processes overlap, that merely swaps in a looser diagram, absorbing the resistance in front of us. The two whale falls cannot be cut into one continuous seafloor scene, nor do they combine into a prettier rule: one asks us to infer backward from a bone surface, while the other sends meat that has not yet vanished back into a judgment that has already moved later. At the time of sampling, this whale fall had already been assigned to the late enrichment stage, and typical scavenging amphipods still clustered among the residual tissue.