Carcass Feast Deep Opportunism

You float just above a pale ruin — a deflated salp, once a living jet-propelled barrel of near-invisible gel, now collapsed flat against the abyssal ooze at fifteen hundred meters, its circular muscle bands reduced to faint silver-gray striations beneath a skin of white bacterial biofilm. The carcass is the brightest thing in this entire world, catching the sourceless blue-green bioluminescent ambient glow and throwing it back as a soft luminosity against the gray-tan foraminifera-dotted sediment, each foram test a tiny chalk-white sphere or coiled disc pressed into silky silt. Around and across the carcass, an opportunist community has converged with the quiet efficiency of the deep: polychaete worms sweep feathery palps through the biofilm, a brittle star arm segments its way in from the sediment margin — ivory ossicles terminating in amber tube feet that press into the gel — and five amphipods rasp the carcass edge, their carapaces glassy enough to reveal pale viscera within but dominated by deep-red compound eyes that glow like tiny garnets against the cold monotone scene. This is the biological pump's final chapter played out at centimeter scale: a gelatinous body that sank from sunlit surface waters over days or weeks, carrying fixed carbon into permanent darkness, its substance now being partitioned among specialists adapted to exploit exactly this brief, unpredictable, irreplaceable windfall on an otherwise featureless plain.