The emphasis on raising awareness of the particularities involved in extinction processes forms one aspect of this. 2002). “Extinction” is the word one uses when one discusses policies and lists, when one determines dates and definitions.”18 Not only does this language fail to capture the significance of the loss of a species, it also fails to bring to light the relational forms of life that made the species possible. Deloughrey, “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene,” 37. In more recent work, Alaimo has discussed the contributions of unknown extinctions to the process of being put in suspension, or “under pressure.”84 Indeed discussing the very kinds of deep-sea extinctions I have begun to unpack here, she writes that “the not-yet-nor-never-to-be-discovered marine species that (must) have become extinct due to anthropogenic causes—which elude capture by human knowledge systems but nonetheless cannot elude the unintended effects of human actions—would be apt icons for the Anthropocene seas.”85 Imagined in particular ways, these “icons” could signal the ways that “human knowledge is not adequate to account for, nor certainly to ameliorate, the enormity of the effects of a geological epoch distinguished by anthropogenic consequences.”86 This challenge to fragmentation, with an emphasis on the transcorporeal connectivity that underpins the wide-ranging nature of these “unintended” effects, resonates with Rose’s skepticism of the types of thinking fostered by modernity. Her work crosses critical time studies and environmental humanities, with a focus on the role of time in human and more-than-human modes of relation. Alternatively, the whale fall may be too recent to allow sufficient time for vesicomyid colonization. Such consequences may be complex indeed.”117, And yet, unless these stories are told carefully, there is the particular risk of developing accounts, of the kind that Mitchell and Noah Theriault have criticized, where the distant and disconnected extinction story “normalizes the profound violences driving extinction, while cocooning its viewers in the secure space of the voyeur.”118 Thus, Rose’s emphasis on “living in the present temporalities, localities, and relationalities of our actual lives” when trying to respond to extinction remains a powerful injunction for unknown extinctions, particularly in continuing to try to trace one’s connections with, and responsibilities for, the processes causing these losses. }, author={Craig R Smith and Adrian G. Glover and Tina Treude and Nicholas D. Higgs and Diva J. Amon}, journal={Annual review of marine science}, year={2015}, … Mitchell, “Beyond Biodiversity and Species,” 38. In my own efforts within this area, I have been particularly inspired by Rose’s account of the ethics of writing in a time of extinctions in her article “Slowly ∼ Writing into the Anthropocene.” In it she states that “unmaking is going on all around us these days” and asks “what a scholarly writer might do in the face of all this anthropogenic disaster.”27 Rose argues that resisting this unmaking involves resisting the kinds of thinking fostered by modernity. This move can also be found in research on whale falls. The explorers said the whale fall was spotted at a depth of 3,238 meters — roughly 2 miles beneath the ocean surface. This understanding need not be an instrumental one that is explored only to know what makes the orchid flower, but in a way that can “shift the patterns of our ethical responses and responsibilities more widely.”99 That is, Smith proposes that “ethics flows through the landscape as we attend to it. This is because, like the selectivity of known extinctions that have been critiqued for the lack of attention to the “unloved others” that are sidelined in stories of individual charismatic species loss,87 among unknown extinctions there are also some that are loved more than others. The carriage is now still suspended 10 metres above a footpath at De Akkers metro station in Spijkenisse, near Rotterdam. With the increasing interest in thinking more critically about the oceans within the humanities and social sciences, a wide range of scholars have explored how the oceans threaten, rework and re-form Western conceptual frameworks through the different ontologies they offer.77 Given our interests here in multispecies interrelationality and responsibilities that occur beyond knowledge and encounter, Stacy Alaimo’s account of a transcorporeal ethics thought through the deep sea is particularly useful. As philosopher James Hatley writes, the idiom available for speaking about deep concerns over the survival of fellow earth beings “all too often proves itself to be antiseptic and distant. supports HTML5 A second concern has been how to tell these stories in ways that move readers beyond what Rose has characterized as an “ethical paralysis that is invading our lives,”22 drawing them instead into ethical responsibility. Here we report the serendipitous discovery of a late-stage natural whale fall at a depth of 1444 m in the South Sandwich Arc. The work of the rest of this article will be to explore this seeming impasse. Abstract. The initial whale-fall work was reviewed by Smith & Baco (2003) and included several ma-jor findings. . B. Nation,53 use metapopulation modeling to suggest more concretely that species that were less common (i.e., ones that were found [at minimum] in less than 80 percent of whale-fall habitats) will now have been lost because the number of whale falls will not have been enough to sustain them.54 These extinctions may also have rippled out to other deep sea communities, particularly those populating hydrothermal vents and seeps through the “loss of whale skeleton stepping stones.”55 Thus even while the discovery of whale falls has led to a richer account of the great variety of ways that lives are made on our shared planet, our understandings of the great unmaking and unraveling have become more multidimensional as well. are not casually removed from the deep sea without a detectable impact on the animals that have come to rely on them as a critical resource over evolutionary time.”51 While many references to extinction in the literature have been speculative, Roman et al.,52 and more recently Smith, Roman, and J. Roman et al., “Whales as Marine Ecosystem Engineers,” 377. Whale falls have several remarkable qualities that yield unusual, energy-rich ecosystems at the ocean floor. All Rights Reserved. Michelle Bastian; Whale Falls, Suspended Ground, and Extinctions Never Known. The carcass represents a localized and complex ecosystem which has supported deep-sea creatures for centuries. In an influential article for The Scientific American, “The Last of the Great Whales,” published in 1966, conservationist Scott McVay joined the chorus of concern about the future of great whales. We consider the consequences of removing these animals on the … How we are brought to telling a particular story is a common theme in extinction studies approaches, but not all are as immediate as Rose’s encounter with hunted dingoes. Many thanks to Matt Chrulew in particular for designing, organizing, and hosting this workshop as well as all the other wonderful participants. The article’s focus is on the recently discovered ecosystems of creatures that live on the remnants of dead whales on the sea floor, which are known as “whale falls.” It reads these ecosystems via a notion of “suspended ground,” which brings together philosopher Mick Smith’s rethinking of an ethics of encounter with unknown soil extinctions and Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “suspension.” The article argues that engaging with ethographic writing from this perspective enables one to weave a more explicit account of the mysterious and the unknown into the approach. Many of these calls are framed in terms of the potential uses for humans that are being lost, such as the possibility of a cure for cancer. Four successional stages have been identified, where the whale is first broken down by scavengers eating the soft tissue, then opportunist polychaetes (bristle worms) and crustaceans eat the “fallout” from this process. While reading it I couldn’t help wondering what might have been happening deeper under the surface. basin floor.”43 By 2003 Smith and Amy Baco were able to claim that “despite being one of the least-studied deep-sea reducing habitats, whale falls may harbour the highest levels of global species richness; thus far, 407 species are known from whale falls.”44 In the most recent review from 2015, Smith et al. During a 2019 expedition, researchers discovered a whale fall at 10,623 feet below the surface near Davidson Seamount in NOAA's Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Referencing Aldo Leopold and Alf Hornberg, Rose writes “if it takes a mountain to think long-term connectivity, it takes modernity to think of a mountain as a gravel pit, and to haul it away piece by broken piece.”28 She argues that the logic of the fragmented gravel pit undermines understandings of connectivity and mutuality, causing “such separation and isolation that the ground for ethics appears to be broken.”29 Challenging these processes, Rose urges us to think relationally and ethically, by “living in the present temporalities, localities, and relationalities of our actual lives.”30, For Rose, this situatedness is important for telling extinction stories that encourage ethical responsibility because “ethics are situated in bodies, in time, in place and, necessarily, in encounter” (my emphasis).31 For example, in “Slowly” she discusses an encounter with dingoes who had been killed and hung up for display in a tree just outside of Canberra. Jørgensen, “Endling”; van Dooren and Rose, “Keeping Faith with the Dead.”. Sequential Megafaunal Collapse in the North Pacific Ocean: An Ongoing Legacy of Industrial Whaling? Rose, “Connectivity Thinking, Animism, and the Pursuit of Liveliness,” 506. Van Dooren and Rose, “Lively Ethography,” 82–83. Remembering that Rose argued to “write into unmaking is a performative practice that calls for multiple strategies,”17 I conclude by suggesting a situated unknowing that foregrounds the role of the unknowable within the ecological animism underpinning lively ethographies, and that helps us to weave this into the approach more explicitly so that the shifting and unsettling nature of shared ground can come to the fore. A whale fall is a phrase used to describe a cetacean's carcass that has settled in the abyssal or bathyal zone, that is, deeper than 3,300 feet in the ocean floor. In his article “Dis(Appearance): Earth, Ethics and Apparently (In)Significant Others,” Smith grapples with the problem of creatures who do not appear to us, and the conflict this creates with many of the ethical theories available for thinking through extinction within a Western context. A subway train in the Netherlands was saved from a spectacular crash when it burst through buffers and landed on an artwork in the shape of a whale tail. Their findings suggest that whale-fall specialists are likely to be “highly dependent on the evolution and widespread occurrence of very large whales,”72 the same whales that have been the key targets for whalers. In December 2014, George Monbiot wrote a piece on “Why Whale Poo Matters” for the Guardian with the subtitle, “Not only does nutrient-rich whale poo help reverse the effects of climate change—it’s a remarkable example that nothing in the natural world occurs in isolation.”38 He focused on the trophic cascades arising from the release of large fecal plumes at the ocean’s surface. . I was part of a group of environmental humanities scholars and marine scientists brought together to talk about sea and society, and finally I got to pose my question to someone who might have an answer. At the outset Krogh confessed to the delegates “that I know nothing about it, that I have to offer only more or less vague suggestions.”41 Nonetheless he was willing to propose that to understand the possibilities of life on the ocean floor, we must understand what potential food sources might be available. Moreover, given that whaling varied globally in terms of timescale and intensity, this loss of habitat will not have occurred simultaneously across the earth’s oceans. have been depleted or extinct for >100 y.”65 Here the extinction debts are said to be most likely to be “realized.”66 However, extinction processes set in train by whaling “may be ongoing in the Southern Ocean and northeast Pacific, where intense whaling occurred into the 1960’s and 1970’s.”67 Writing around a decade ago, Smith claimed that in some cases “whale-fall specialists may only now be approaching their greatest habitat loss, potentially causing species extinctions to be occurring at their highest historical rates.”68 Proposals for urgently investigating whale-fall communities in these areas are thus a high priority for researchers.69. Collectively this research enables us to assert that extinctions have occurred and are currently occurring within whale-fall ecologies. Whale falls thus pose particular questions for the lively approach to storying extinction. Crucially, he challenged the neglect of study of the kind of cascades I had being wondering about, noting that “the excreta and dead bodies of larger animals do not appear to have been seriously considered as food of the bottom fauna.”42 Fifty or so years later oceanographer Craig Smith and his team were able to announce in Nature that through the use of a deep submergence research vessel off the coast of California they had discovered a decomposing carcass of a fin or blue whale which had “produced a microhabitat distinct from the surrounding . Smith and Baco, “Ecology of Whale Falls at the Deep-Sea Floor,” 329. She has recent publications in GeoHumanities, Parallax, and New Formations. However, what came as a surprise to ocean researchers was the finding that dead whales support entire ecosystems. Roman et al., “Whales as Marine Ecosystem Engineers.”, Springer et al., “Sequential Megafaunal Collapse in the North Pacific Ocean.”, Butman, Carlton, and Palumbi, “Whales Don’t Fall Like Snow.”. While this narrows things down a little, it is still not much to go on for an ethography of the sort that van Dooren and Rose have championed. The rest are trivial: they ‘drop out’ of history.”92 From the examples discussed so far, it is possible to see these frames at work within unknown extinctions. Smith and Baco, “Ecology of Whale Falls at the Deep-Sea Floor,” 332. . Hatley for instance has described his experience of first scanning through a list of extinct species in Japan, reflecting that “extinction has become so endemic to our time that choosing (as if choice where the modality by which these responsibilities are to be fulfilled!) Merriam-Webster Dictionary, quoted in Alaimo, “States of Suspension,” 153. Spanning an epic story across approximately fifteen hours of playtime, players will command the armies of Riverwatch to bring an end to a sinister plot to shoot down the legendary creatures and throw the world into chaos. Whale-fall ecosystems: recent insights into ecology, paleoecology, and evolution. I then tell my own story of being drawn to whale-fall ecosystems and what I have found so far. Rose, van Dooren, and Chrulew, Extinction Studies, 5. reference 2 "http://www.columbia.edu/~rwb2103/whale/whalefallintro.html Whale fall … Whale carcasses create long-lived, ecologically significant habitats that support diverse and highly specialized ‘whale fall’ communities, and which may have been critical in the dispersal and evolution of chemosymbiotic communities during the Cenozoic1,2. browser that Smith, Roman, and Nation, “A Metapopulation Model for Whale-Fall Specialists,” 2. First, whale falls are abundant over regional scales in the deep sea and support a point out “whales were once almost exclusively valued as goods to be removed from the ocean,”109 but they also grew as the focus of “noninstrumental concern” leading to a shifted ground where what Mick Smith calls “the earthly percolation of ethical flows” might lead us from whales to poo to those feeding on sunken carcasses and the shadowy whale-fall specialists who might be just now passing through their most dangerous point of extinction crisis. Whale falls are places of evolutionary novelty, sheltering species first discovered on the bones of dead whales. Van Dooren and Rose, “Lively Ethography,” 77. Smith, Roman, and Nation, “A Metapopulation Model for Whale-Fall Specialists,” 12. Van Dooren and Rose, “Lively Ethography,” 91. As Roman et al. Finally, there is a “reef stage” where the hardened remains are used by suspension feeders.59 This entire process is thought to last for up to ninety years, with the sulfophilic stage in particular lasting for between forty and eighty years.60, Like the light from stars, showing us the past rather than the present, whale falls travel through time, continuing to enact the consequences of unfettered industrial whaling and complicating what might actually be meant by Rose’s “present temporalities” of our lives. This approach, developed by Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren, seeks to draw readers into imaginative encounters with embodied, specific, and lively creatures to support situated ethical responses. States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, The Anthropocene at Sea: Temporality, Paradox, Compression, The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, Encountering Leatherbacks in Multispecies Knots of Time, Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations, Precarious Communities: Towards a Phenomenology of Extinction, Ontologies of Nature: Continental Perspectives and Environmental Reorientations, Whales Don’t Fall Like Snow: Reply to Jelmert, Extinction in a Distant Land: The Question of Elliot’s Bird of Paradise, Inundation, Extinction, and Lacustrine Lives, Marine researchers stumble upon a whale carcass during live-streamed deep-sea dive, Cultural Geographies of Extinction: Animal Culture among Scottish Ospreys, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Death, Absence, and Afterlife in the Garden, Walking with Ōkami, the Large-Mouthed Pure God, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Endling, the Power of the Last in an Extinction-Prone World, Immortality and Infinitude in the Anthropocene, Presence of Absence, Absence of Presence, and Extinction Narratives, Nature, Temporality, and Environmental Management: Scandinavian and Australian Perspectives on Peoples and Landscapes, Conditions of Life at Great Depths in the Ocean, New Frontiers for Deep Fluids and Geobiology Research in the World’s Oldest Rocks, Ghost Species: Spectral Geographies of Biodiversity Conservation, The Importance of Absence in the Present: Practices of Remembrance and the Contestation of Absences, Beyond Biodiversity and Species: Problematizing Extinction, Decolonizing against Extinction Part II: Extinction Is Not a Metaphor—It Is Literally Genocide, Migrating Microbes and Planetary Protection, Connectivity Thinking, Animism, and the Pursuit of Liveliness, Writing Creates Ecology: Ecology Creates Writing, Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Interactions in the Sentient World, Unloved Others: Death of the Disregarded in the Time of Extinctions, Planetary Exploration in the Time of Astrobiology: Protecting against Biological Contamination, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bigger Is Better: The Role of Whales as Detritus in Marine Ecosystems, Ecology of Whale Falls at the Deep-Sea Floor, Oceanography and Marine Biology: An Annual Review, Whale-Fall Ecosystems: Recent Insights into Ecology, Paleoecology, and Evolution, A Metapopulation Model for Whale-Fall Specialists: The Largest Whales Are Essential to Prevent Species Extinctions, Dis(Appearance): Earth, Ethics and Apparently (In)Significant Others. However, far from the lofty goal of curing significant diseases, in an effort to demonstrate the economic potential of preserving these ecosystems the articles I have read so far can end up awkwardly talking about whale-fall bacteria as “a novel source of cold-adapted enzymes of potential utility in cold-water detergents.”91 What this suggests is that the fact of the failure of human knowledge in the face of unknown extinctions does not reliably challenge humanist narratives of progress and economic success and the fragmentation they encourage. Here I would suggest that Rick de Vos’s careful work on birds of paradise and the loss of endemic species in Tasmania’s Lake Pedder provides examples that already seek to draw us in this direction.114 Further, while not explicitly thematized, van Dooren’s most recent work calls attention to the extinctions of Hawaiian snails that will now never be known to Western science.115, Toward the end of work on this article, a colleague texted me one night with news that the discovery of a whale fall by the E/V Nautilus team was being live-streamed on Twitter. This size provides a refuge from most predators, with the consequ… Rose, van Dooren, and Chrulew, Extinction Studies, 1. Large cetacean carcasses at the deep-sea floor, known as ‘whale falls’, provide a resource for generalist-scavenging species, chemosynthetic fauna related to those from hydrothermal vents and cold seeps, and remarkable bone-specialist species such as Osedax worms. As Cheryl Ann Butman and her colleagues argue, when examining the effects of whaling on deep-sea biodiversity, while conservation interest has been centered on issues where the “ecological consequences are at least partially known,” such as habitat destruction and eutrophication, “the more subtle, human-mediated change in global ocean biodiversity due to the effects of whaling on deep-sea communities has potential ecological consequences that were and are entirely unknown. . It has been suggested that the extinct species in question are less likely to be specialist scavengers—since these are usually able to eat a range of resources—and more likely to be in the sulphophilic and opportunist stages (Craig Smith, pers. Drawing on numbers, lists, and population counts, McVay marshaled together graphs of numbers of whales caught in units of thousands, catch records that fall off precipitously, and specimen illustrations drawn to scale. They mention August Krogh, who spoke to delegates at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago on the “Conditions of Life at Great Depths in the Ocean” in 1933. As Rose, van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew write in their introduction to Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations, “while charismatic endangered species occasionally grab a headline or two, all around us a quieter systemic process of loss is relentlessly ticking on.”19 They argue that extinction must be set within a multispecies framework where the focus is “on understanding and responding to processes of collective death, where not just individual organisms, but entire ways and forms of life, are at stake.”20 Key to the approach, then, is moving away from the notion of an extinction event that takes place upon the death of the last individual and toward extinction as a longer, drawn-out process that affects many other living forms.21.

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