Kid Lit Review of “Life After Whale: The Amazing Ecosystem of a Whale Fall” by Lynn Brunelle

This book offers a treasure trove of extraordinary facts about the blue whale – at over 85 feet long, the largest animal ever seen on earth.

But this account has a twist. It begins with the end of the giant whale’s life, and describes the entirely new ecosystem that results from its passing. The whale carcasses, or “whale falls” provide an extensive and changing supply of food for organisms in the sea.

The body slides down into the depths of the ocean, eventually landing on the seafloor over a mile below, kicking up a tiny cloud of “marine snow,” or microscopic bits of dead animals and plants that look like snow when disturbed.

Most creatures near the bottom of the ocean survive primarily on this marine snow, but when a dead whale body arrives, this rich new buffet attracts over 400 different species of deep-sea creatures. Brunelle points out:

“The whale body becomes the foundation for an ecosystem tangled with food chains and webs, interlocking the lives of thousands of creatures.”

She reviews the phases of whale fall ecosystems and how the trail of chemicals emitted by the body sends signals across miles of open water to alert hungry scavengers. She describes the behaviors of hagfish, sleeper sharks, rattail fish, king crabs, and others:

“After a few weeks pass, the carcass is a busy city.”

Creatures that feed on the flesh during the mobile scavenger phase are eventually replaced by creatures that feed on bone as part of the enrichment opportunist phase.

A third phase is called the sulfophilic, or sulfur-loving, phase, and will last over a century, as the flurry of activity is on the microscopic scale.

A fourth phase actually occurs in the middle of the sulfophilic phase, and is called the reef phase. During this time, chemicals from the bones move upward, carrying nutrients that feed algae and other plankton, which in turn feed krill, which in turn feed hungry whales, and the cycle begins anew.

Back matter by the author, who is a four-time Emmy Award-winning writer for “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” gives more detailed information about blue whales and about ecosystems, as well as sources for additional research.

The watercolor illustrations by Jason Chin show his dedication to research and scientific accuracy. He reported in an interview that he “geeked out on whale anatomy and did a lot of whale skeleton drawings to prepare.” He also said that he employed sfumato, a painting technique for softening the transition between colors, which affects focus and perspective, in order to give a sense of depth and scale to the living whale and the huge ocean in which it lives.

Evaluation: I continue to be amazed by all that is missed by people who don’t even think to look at children’s books because they don’t have kids or grandkids. There is such a wealth of information and visual stimulation there! And this book has something extra: an affirmation of life and the cycles that involve all life forms, turning us back into stardust, so to speak, from whence we came, and from there recycled into something new. In fact, whale fall is a wonderful example of the physics law of conservation of mass, which holds that mass can neither be created nor destroyed, although it may be rearranged in space, or the entities associated with it may be changed in form. Perhaps this book will inspire some kids to take a deeper look into physics as well as biology. This extraordinary effort by Brunelle and Chin will not disappoint, and you will be talking about it for a long time.

Rating: 5/5

Published by Neal Porter Books, Holiday House, 2024