{"id":541704,"date":"2026-01-25T11:48:21","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T11:48:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/541704\/"},"modified":"2026-01-25T11:48:21","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T11:48:21","slug":"zombie-worms-have-mysteriously-vanished-troubling-scientists-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/541704\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Zombie Worms’ Have Mysteriously Vanished, Troubling Scientists : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fallen whale carcasses<\/a> offer islands of nutrition within an otherwise sparse seafloor, and with help from bone-eating zombie worms, they can sustain an entire ecosystem for decades.<\/p>\n

But in recent years, scientists have found the zombie worms (genus Osedax<\/a>) are missing in action off the coast of British Columbia, at a site nearly 900 meters (3,000 feet) deep in the Pacific Ocean.<\/p>\n

Under normal circumstances, the worm larvae float freely in the water column, waiting for the chance to settle on a freshly fallen whale skeleton or some other bones<\/a>. There, they quickly mature into adult worms and begin secreting an acid from their ‘roots’ to bore through the hard cortical exterior of the bone.<\/p>\n

Related: A Dead Whale at The Bottom of The Ocean Is Now a Thriving Home of Life<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Each zombie worm hosts a colony of symbiotic bacteria<\/a> within its body, which helps it digest otherwise-inedible fats and proteins (especially collagen) from the bones.<\/p>\n

This slow-motion feeding frenzy unlocks delicious nutrients for other deep-sea creatures, increasing the diversity and complexity of the whale fall ecosystem. These microhabitats, when they form, create “stepping-stones<\/a>” for species to disperse hundreds of kilometers through the ocean.<\/p>\n

\"YouTube frameborder=”0\u2033 allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen><\/p>\n

It’s troubling, then, that when scientists placed humpback whale bones on the deep seafloor of British Columbia, not a single zombie worm turned up on their cameras, across all 10 years of monitoring.<\/p>\n

The team who conducted the study, led by benthic ecologist Fabio De Leo of the University of Victoria, suspect the worms’ absence may be explained by insufficient oxygen.<\/p>\n

\"Bone-EatingAfter 10 years on the seafloor, this whale bone should be riddled with zombie worms. (Ocean Networks Canada)<\/p>\n

The Barkley Canyon<\/a> (where the whale bones were placed and monitored) is naturally low in oxygen, but areas of the deep sea with these asphyxiating conditions \u2013 known as oxygen minimum zones<\/a> (OMZ) or ‘dead zones’ \u2013 are expanding under climate change<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Basically, we’re talking about potential species loss,” says<\/a> De Leo.<\/p>\n

If fewer zombie worms nourish seafloor communities, then the ‘island’ habitats they create may become few and far between, and “you could start losing a diversity of Osedax species across regional spatial scales,” De Leo says<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Subscribe<\/a><\/p>\n

“It looks like the OMZ expansion, which is a consequence of ocean warming, will be bad news for these amazing whale-fall and wood-fall ecosystems along the northeast Pacific Margin,” says<\/a> University of Hawai’i oceanographer Craig Smith, who co-led the experiment with De Leo.<\/p>\n

Smith and De Leo have been monitoring another whale fall<\/a> at the Clayoquot Slope<\/a> off Vancouver Island that should soon offer further insight into the potential loss of zombie worms from our oceans.<\/p>\n

The initial study was published in Frontiers in Marine Science<\/a> in 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fallen whale carcasses offer islands of nutrition within an otherwise sparse seafloor, and with help from bone-eating zombie…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":541705,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[352,159,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-541704","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-msft-content","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115955584585847041","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541704\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/541705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}