Lost Chain of Underwater Volcanoes Is a Massive Whale Superhighway

By Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer | October 9, 2018 05:10pm ET

Thanks to an especially slobbery "Looney Tune," the island of Tasmania is best-known for its eponymous devils. But the nearby Tasman Sea is no less rich in oddball biodiversity. Take, for example, the newest discovery reported by the Australian research vessel the Investigator. A team of seafaring scientists has uncovered an ancient highway of massive underwater volcanoes — and those submerged mountains (or "seamounts" ) are apparently brimming with whales, according to a news release from Australia's national science agency. [Infographic: Tallest Mountain to Deepest Ocean Trench]

"While we were over the chain of seamounts, the ship was visited by large numbers of humpback and long-finned pilot whales," Eric Woehler, a seabird ecologist at the University of Tasmania and a crewmember aboard the Investigator during its recent expedition, said in a statement. "We estimated that at least 28 individual humpback whales visited us on one day, followed by a pod of 60 to 80 long-finned pilot whales the next."

Woehler and a crew of colleagues had recently embarked on a 25-day tourof the Tasman Sea to study ocean productivity — the process by which microscopic phytoplankton turn sunlight into the carbon that sustains entire ocean ecosystems. While Woehler surveyed the local marine life, other crewmembers scanned for signs of phytoplankton activity and mapped previously uncharted chunks of the ocean floor using a special sonar.

Once the Investigator had sailed about 250 miles (400 kilometers) east of Tasmania, the crew saw spikes in phytoplankton activity. Sonar scans revealed that the activity coincided with the appearance of a gargantuan chain of volcanic mountains submerged thousands of feet below the surface of the sea.

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