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“Often they feed by diving to the bottom and sifting big gulps of sediment through their baleen, consuming the amphipods in great numbers,” Milstein said.

The whale will naturally decompose, creating a “huge nutrient boost for the local environment,” feeding scavengers like eagles and ravens, down to little amphipods, Boothe said.

"We found a large number of jellyfish in the stomachs of the amphipods, from the largest jellyfish in the fjord to tiny hydrozoans," explains Charlotte Havermans.

Osborn wants to find out why so many highly specialized eyes have evolved among twilight zone amphipods.

The other, Siena McKim of the University of California, Santa Barbara, discovered that at least one amphipod species produces this fiber with some of the same genes as silkworms.