Whalefall (2026)

Bald Brah said:

Those whales dive to 10,000ft. Humans can survive ~200ft on compressed air. I don't think he has much of a chance even if he did saw his way out pretty fast.

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Yup, my first thought when I saw the trailer was the sperm whale is eating a colossal/giant squid, which are usually at extreme depths. Even if for some reason this one was close to the surface, a run of the mill scuba setup isn't rated to go down very far. At some point the environment would just kill the diver, regardless as to the whale

hory said:

Whales stomachs don't have digestive acids?

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They do. The bigger issue is how those whales eat - they don't use their teeth to chew up the squid, their throat muscles basically help masticate the food for them. So realistically the diver would be fatally crushed by that presuming the whale was large enough to gulp down a diver.

But then you wouldn't have a movie, so I suspect there will be a lot of suspension of disbelief lol

Fun fact: Whalefall refers to a whale dying and sinking to the bottom of the ocean, where all the deep sea critters have a mega whale buffet. It's actually thought to be an important part of marine ecosystems since extremely deep areas of the ocean tend to be poor in nutrients.

Animosity said:

Obviously just a modern day reimagining of Pinocchio.

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neither the whale nor the diver are guant, bald black women. so i wouldn't QUITE call it modern.

Cybsled said:

Fun fact: Whalefall refers to a whale dying and sinking to the bottom of the ocean, where all the deep sea critters have a mega whale buffet. It's actually thought to be an important part of marine ecosystems since extremely deep areas of the ocean tend to be poor in nutrients.

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Yeah this is awesome.

Once the corpse rots a special worm takes root in its bones and lives there absorbing the nutrients. This species apparently only lives on whale falls, hopping around from one to the next.

Think of that. Over many millions of years, enough whale carcasses have fallen to the ocean floor that evolution has led a species of worm to specialize to the point they don't live anywhere else. It was like, "theres enough whale bones it would be a waste of resources to bother feeding on anything else".

I love the scale this implies, the huge number of whale falls over tens or hundreds of millions of years.

Aldarion said:

love the scale this implies, the huge number of whale falls over tens or hundreds of millions of years.

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It also shows one of the pitfalls in being a specialist species: If whales went extinct or their population crashed, then species that solely rely upon that would vanish.

If widespread commercial whaling hadn’t been stopped and continued to ramp up, there is a very real possibility something like that could have eventually happened.

Depends because ecosystem can be complex and we understand very little about extremely deep marine environments. That is one reason there have been voiced concerns about harvesting those mineral orbs in the deep seas: we don’t fully know if there will be unforeseen knock-on effects that could radiate into the wider ocean. Like those orbs produce some oxygen via electrolysis - if they are removed, does that impact oxygen saturation in a way that might cause local or widespread disruption of deep sea life, and if so, how much does that impact sea life higher up?

Worms break down bones, making more nutrients available for other life, which could have similar knock on effects we don’t fully understand. If could be an evolutionary niche that doesn’t impact much, it could be something that impacts the roots of a food web. We understand so very little about ocean ecosystems that far down