‘For the reef, it was like winning the lottery’

When an 8m humpback whale dies and sinks to the seabed, how long before it’s just a skeleton? The answer may surprise you.

The whale’s carcass in Coral Bay. Picture: Brooke Pyke

Brooke Pyke’s friends had seen the ­ailing humpback whale a few days before in Coral Bay. It was a juvenile, perhaps a couple of years old, and 8m long. For reasons unknown, it was dying; the poor animal’s skin was covered in sores and it was so exhausted it could only loll at the surface – even as dozens of sharks circled, waiting for their chance to feed. Then the young whale died, and sank to the seabed in 12m of water. Within days its carcass had been stripped bare, leaving a gleaming white skeleton on the sand.

Pyke, 32, who works as a photographer on the dive boats in Exmouth, taking tourists out to swim with Ningaloo’s whale sharks and other giant fauna, drove down to Coral Bay with her 4m tinnie to find and photograph the carcass. She’d been given its co-ordinates, but she hardly needed them. “There was a big slick of whale oil on the water, and seabirds feeding on scraps that had floated up to the surface,” she says. “And the stench was incredible.”

Pyke jumped in the water and watched as the last chunks of meat on the carcass were torn off by tiger sharks and other fish, leaving the ­remaining scraps to the marine worms, crustaceans and microbes. Her remarkable image is a finalist in the global Underwater Photographer of the Year 2024 competition.

Humpbacks are seasonal visitors to Ningaloo, on their annual migration between their summer feeding grounds in Antarctica and the warm, protected waters of Camden Sound in the Kimberley. Pyke loves to swim with these intelligent mammals, which can reach 16m long. And although sad that this young whale died, she sees it as part of the ocean’s constant recycling. “All of that energy it accrued in ­Antarctica, fattening up on krill, was brought up to Ningaloo and passed on to the animals there when it passed away,” she says. “For that bit of the reef, it was like winning the lottery.”

See more of Brooke Pyke’s photography