Worldbuilding: Cutting Down to the Bone

In your world, what eats dragon bones?

This is a serious question. One of the gruesome but fascinating discoveries about undersea life in recent years has been the question of, what exactly happens to whale carcasses? Sure, sharks and other opportunistic surface life get their share, but the remnants of the carcasses do, eventually, sink. All the way down.

The deep ocean is notoriously dark, cold, and poor in food sources. It’s like a desert; if a desert were under enough water pressure to squish you like a bony grape. Creatures at depth tend to be slow-moving, fragile, and able to subsist on not much at all for long periods of time.

And then, like manna out of the far-above sky, down falls Huge Amounts of Food. Marine biologists even coined a term for it; “whalefall”. Bones, carcass bits, everything – all of it is potential food to the abyss.

Somehow, critters find it. Hagfish, of course, scavenging away, but also crabs, odder fish, squids and relatives; just about anything alive finds its way to the booty eventually. A whalefall can last a long time, with a whole colony of organisms sprouting up around it, just as they do around black smokers with their sulfur-eating archaea food source. Even the spermaceti and other hard-to-crack fats will get eaten, by bacteria that in surface waters are often found nibbling oil spills.

So apply this to fantastic worlds, whether fantasy or SF. If you have natural megafauna (for varying degrees of natural), eventually a specimen will die, and then there will be creatures adapted to eat it. I’d think this would be particularly critical when you deal with super-tough beasties like leviathans and dragons. Something has to be able to get through the skin, even if they do it by waiting until an eye or some other orifice decays enough to let them in. Something has to be able to decay that skin. Something has to be able to break down ultra-strong bones, nervous systems of wires or magic, the Ultimate Acid stomach.

That could be a very scary Something, if you think about it.

And some character in your world should think about it. Big critters are often dangerous to humans, through sheer mass if nothing else, and you’d want to investigate any tool at hand to take them down. Especially if your world has mind-control, or anything that might madden an otherwise normal creature into an unstoppable juggernaut bent on sating its cravings for human flesh.

…Or, for your average red dragon, Tuesday.

This would be of particular interest to necromancers, for one thing. What good are undead hordes if there’s something out there that chews up bones like toothpicks?

…Huh. Maybe the ultimate anti-necromancer weapons would be trained wolverines?

Give your adventurers plenty of stuff to kill. But think about what happens after!