The grim task of clearing hundreds of washed-up whale carcasses was under way in New Zealand Tuesday, with the beach closed over fears the bodies will fill with gas and explode as they decompose. The sands at Farewell Spit where the nearly 700 pilot whales ...

Andrew David Thaler: I actually work a lot with dead whales, in the deep sea. When a whale dies at sea, it tends to sink, and that’s a huge input of food into deep-sea ecosystem, which tend to be very food-limited. So it represents basically a massive input of energy and you get these huge, unique communities that grow and live around them. So I’m very interested in dead whales, primarily ...