Deep Inside bin Laden’s Watery Grave
The Current often laments humankind’s tendency to treat our one ocean as a kind of infinite, unpollutable dumping ground. From municipalities to fishing boats, cruise ships to oil rigs, people seem to feel that tossing unwanted junk into the sea is easy and appropriate.
Photo: Alexander Safonov/Getty Images
Which is why on Monday, when Osama bin Laden wound up on the wrong end of automatic weapon fire and needed to be dumped, no one blinked as his corpse splashed into the sea. My mind, of course, went immediately to: What exactly happens to a body when it’s dropped into the salty ocean? Does it sink, or is it instant shark bait? If it floats for awhile, how long will it take to decompose?
Scientific studies of ocean-borne bodily decomposition have been done pigs, because pigling skin is, like humans, hairless and soft-skinned, and we carry similar “gut bacteria.”
On land, although dogs, vultures or other large animals may get first dibs on decomposing flesh, flies and other insects are usually first to attack the soft tissue of dead bodies. Depending on weather conditions, a corpse left exposed in warm conditions in the wild will be reduced to bones within a couple weeks.
When the deceased is swallowed by saltwater, a different set of predators takes over. Like so much about the ocean, relatively little is known for sure, but one thing is certain: Sharks are the number-one scavenger.
“Like any predator, sharks are opportunistic feeders, and they’ll take advantage of any resource that’s given to them,” says George Burgess. Director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, Burgess is also the curator of the International Shark Attack File.
The VENUS Project of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, joined by the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, experimented with weighting a dead pig and dropping it into the Saanich Inlet. A remotely operated camera transmitted real-time data back to scientists aboard a Coast Guard research vessel on the surface.
The results? “The pig saw a lot of action,” says the official report. “After a first day, a large section of one haunch was missing after a possible shark attack.” Hit-and-miss scavenging continued. After six days, crabs had gathered en masse over the carcass.
If a human body drops to the deep ocean floor, the lack of light, the extreme cold and heavy pressure will kill off bacteria, slowing decomposition. Big fish may swim deep and take some bites, followed by smaller detritivores, like lampreys. Even at the bottom of the ocean floor, the competition for food, and microscopic but voracious organisms, would reduce the body to bones in a few days.
When a big whale dies and sinks, it sets in motion a new beginning for deep-sea life, bringing “a whopping amount of organic matter” to a place where food is scarce. The first so-called whale fall was observed in 1987 by marine biologists off Santa Catalina, California, at 4,000 feet below sea level.
For several years the dead whale becomes a kind of sub-ocean aquaculture project, feeding a community of more than 190 species, including lobsters, bristle worms, prawns, shrimp, hagfish, bone-eating worms, crabs, sea cucumbers, octopuses, mussels and clams. Eventually, large colonies of tubeworms take over the carcasses. More than 30 previously unknown species of marine life have been discovered at whale falls around the globe.
But a good-sized whale outweighs even a tall man by thousands of times; so the end for a human body heading toward the ocean floor would come relatively quickly. Given bin Laden’s unsavory infamy, I guess it’s not so surprising that he would end up, to paraphrase Don Corleone, “Swimming with the fishes.”
(For the rest of my dispatch, go to takepart.com)
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