...you could be swallowed by a whale?
“Recently, an American diver claimed to have been swallowed by a whale, but can whales really swallow people? And could you survive in the stomach of a whale?”
Last June, an American lobster diver claimed to have been swallowed by a humpback whale, which then spat him out again. The spectacular account drew a blizzard of media attention, but could a whale really swallow a human being?
Two suborders of whales exist in the oceans: baleen whales and toothed whales. In 1891 an English sailor, James Bartley, is said to have been found alive in the stomach of a killer whale, i.e. a toothed whale.
But the humpback whale that supposedly spat out the American diver is a baleen whale. Baleen whales primarily consume plankton or krill – tiny, shrimplike crustaceans – by filling their mouths with large quantities of water and filtering it through long, frayed horn plates: baleens. The whale’s gullet can only expand to a diameter of 30-38cm – not enough to allow an adult to pass. So if the story is true, it was during the filtering of a large mouthful of water that the humpback whale off the US spat out the diver.
Toothed whales, on the other hand, have a larger gullet than baleen whales, because they consume bigger prey. The largest toothed whale, the killer whale, swallows giant octopuses measuring several metres, and could indeed swallow a human being. However, the story about James Bartley still seems highly unlikely. Like cattle, toothed whales have several stomachs with separate functions. The first stomach consists of massive muscle walls that crush the food – because whales are unable to chew. The second stomach breaks down and digests the food by means of acid and enzymes. And a live human simply would not survive these processes.