Invasive species are often both ecologically and economically detrimental, particularly in freshwater ecosystems where direct and indirect impacts of invasion interact with pre-existing anthropogenic stressors to magnify consequences for native communities and habitats. Planktivorous silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix) are invasive in the Mississippi River watershed, where their daily consumption of detrital seston can total more than half their body mass, and where they outnumber all native species combined in some river reaches. Because of these astonishing abilities, silver carp can cause basal resource changes, altering the body sizes and abundances of native plankton communities upon invasion. Much research has focused on this outcome of silver carp proliferation, but investigation into other effects of their presence in invaded systems has not received the same attention. Despite the unique tendency of silver carp to experience species-specific mass-mortality events, for example, there is a dearth of peer-reviewed evaluation of the possible ecological consequences of these occurrences. To elucidate the effects of these events which can comprise hundreds of thousands of individuals, we determined how the decomposition of silver carp carcasses following mass-mortality events affected benthic invertebrate community composition and productivity using a mesocosm approach. Each mesocosm was subjected to either the presence or absence of a silver carp carcass over the length of an eight-week experiment. Carcass presence created anoxic conditions in the mesocosms and acutely increased benthic invertebrate biomass and benthic periphyton growth. While acute, changes to benthic conditions following silver carp mass-mortality events are likely to have long-term effects in both invaded freshwater systems and their surrounding terrestrial landscapes. Given the magnitude of die-offs, it is possible that these events could cause ecosystem-level alterations. Further research, therefore, is needed into the additional impacts that may follow carcass decomposition to quantify and predict outcomes associated with continued silver carp invasion.