An experiment that hoped to simulate what happens when a whale carcass falls to the ocean floor by a team of marine researchers from China was hijacked when a group of non-native animals appeared and ate the bait before it could be studied.
Conducted by Sun Yat-sen University and the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory in China, the test was to observe how scavengers in one of Earth’s least accessible environments would react to a sudden influx of biomass.
Video footage captured by deep-sea monitoring equipment revealed a procession of eight large, slow-moving creatures gliding silently through the gloom to investigate the cow carcass. For a moment, even the researchers were stunned.
