LIFE AFTER WHALE

Infused with wonder, an account of a natural cycle that occurs, mostly, far below the ocean’s surface.

Moving “with grace and power, like a dancer,” a blue whale “whirls above and below the currents of the Pacific Ocean” until she dies a natural death. (Brunelle explains that the wax buildup in the whale’s ear reveals that she died at age 90.) Floating for a time and then sinking slowly to the bottom, her decomposing body will for a century or more feed and house millions of scavengers and those that prey on them, from sharks and seabirds to teeming species of worms, crabs, clams, and other deep-sea dwellers. Not only do entire ecosystems develop in overlapping phases on her flesh and then bones, but released nitrates and other nutrients flow back up toward the surface on spring currents to feed the krill that in turn nourish new generations of blue whales. Brunelle’s prose is both lucid and poetic, while Caldecott-winning illustrator Chin depicts all of these changes in precise but lyrical ways, beginning with views of the living whale arcing majestically through sunlit waters; the artist goes on to show the body resting on the dark, mysterious seafloor as its bones are exposed and scattered by busy hordes of feeders both large and microscopic. The author fills in more details about blue whales and recaps the whole sequence of decomposition at the end, before closing with leads to both print and web resources on whales and whale falls.

Grand and engrossing.