Life After Whale: The Amazing Ecosystem of a Whale Fall by Lynn Brunelle (illustrated by Jason Chin; Neal Porter Books, 2024) is a nonfiction picture book about the complete ecosystem that forms around a whale carcass on the bottom of the ocean. It begins with an elderly whale and in the first pages, the whale dies. The book takes the reader through the stage of decomposition and decay. Most fascinatingly, the various stages provide essential nutrients and habitat, even, for a variety of creatures in the ocean. The text is wonderfully integrated with gorgeous illustrations.
The beginning of the picture book briefly introduces the majestic blue whale, explaining how the whale eats krill (through its baleen, not with teeth) and showing the comparative size of the whale to dinosaurs, elephants, and humans. Chin’s illustrations supplement the text with not just detailed and realistic two-page spreads but also inset pictures to show more details, such as the structure of baleen and the ways earwax plugs show how old the whale is. This type of subset illustration continues occasionally throughout the book, given even further facts about this amazing event and the ecosystem it creates.
As the subtitle suggests, this is a book that focuses on the next stage of a whale’s life: it’s death and decay. From swelling gases bringing the dead well to the surface for birds to eat to the creatures and microscopic bacteria and creatures that feed on the bones a hundred years later, the death of a whale is remarkably interesting. For more than a hundred years, the carcass feeds the ocean. It becomes a part of the “marine snow” that feeds the creatures in the depths. It goes through a variety of stages during its long afterlife: mobile scavenger phase, enrichment opportunist phase, sulfophilic phase, and reef phase. (These are summarized in the last pages, after the “story” has ended.) One of the coolest scientific pictures is the one in this after matter that shows the carcass in the various stages from head to tail.
There are many gross pictures — my nine-year-old frequently said “Ew!” as we read and looked at the illustrations — but it all is fascinating enough that she kind-of-sort-of wants to reread it (a big deal for a girl who doesn’t even like bugs). In addition to those carcass illustrations, though, there are some truly gorgeous ocean spreads: the whale majestically breaching the water, the bioluminescent creatures in the dark blue ocean depths. Both the informative and truly interesting text and the spot-on illustrations make Life After Whale well deserving of the 2025 Sibert Medal.
