Bone Eating Snot Flowers

Whales are huge. (That's a scientific fact.) So have you ever wondered what happens when a whale dies (of natural causes)? That's a lot of meat to just be floating out in the ocean somewhere. Well, first of all they don't float. Whale carcasses sink quickly to the deep ocean floor, and provide a veritable feast for anything that comes along. Initially, large organisms like hagfish and sleeper sharks scavenge the carcass, but some of the more interesting critters come later.

Once the whale is stripped to the bones other, more inventive organisms come along to take advantage of the windfall. One of those is Osedax mucofloris, the bone eating snot flower. It's actually a worm, not a flower, but it doesn't have any form of gut. Instead it has a symbiotic bacteria that digests the lipids in whale bone after the worms themselves have buried into the skeleton. I know, it's all sort of morbid, but tell me that isn't cool. Really.