Oil searchers discover and record deep-sea graveyard off Angola coast

A team of researchers looking for oil and gas deposits beneath the seafloor off the western coast of southern Africa has found four large "fish-falls" on the seabed: the carcasses of one whale shark and three mobulid rays. Finding vertebrate carcasses on the seafloor is quite rare, ocean scientists Nicholas Higgs, Andrew Gates and Daniel Jones report in their paper on the discovery published in PLoS ONE—the "graveyard" offers a unique opportunity to learn more about how the death of large sea creatures and the food they provide to other smaller creatures impacts marine life in general.

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