‘Slimy, wet and rough’: What it’s like inside a whale’s mouth

A prominent whale expert says the kayaker who wound up inside the mouth of a humpback whale in Chile was accidentally scooped up when the animal was feeding – but was in no danger of being swallowed.

Wildlife scientist Dr Vanessa Pirotta said it was not true that the man was swallowed because he was not actually ingested.

“The headline should be changed to ‘Person spends a brief amount of time in a whale’s mouth due to a whale just doing its own thing, and then realising that it doesn’t eat humans’,” Pirotta said.

Pirotta said baleen whales such as humpbacks open their jaws very wide to scoop up as much fish and krill as possible and then expel the water through the fibrous plates they have instead of teeth.

If a human is in the wrong place at the wrong time, they sometimes wind up in the mouth. Pirotta said this was rare, but there had been cases of it happening before. The whale will quickly realise and spit them out.

In 2021, a lobster diver at Cape Cod in Massachusetts reportedly wound up in a humpback whale’s mouth while wearing full scuba gear.

Pirotta said the inside of a humpback’s mouth would be dark, smelly and sound like a sea cave.

“Based on my knowledge and the anatomy, it would be slimy, wet and rough, and like rubbing up against a witch’s broom because that’s kind of what their baleen plates feel like,” she said.

The depiction of Dory and Marlin inside the whale’s mouth in the Pixar movie Finding Nemo was reasonably accurate, Pirotta said. However, the fish would not have been ejected through the blowhole because it’s not connected to the mouth.

A humpback whale surfaces while lunge feeding on menhaden, a small fish, in the Atlantic.Credit: Dave Sanders/The New York Times

Other stories – from Jonah in the Old Testament to Pinocchio – depict humans inside a whale’s stomach and then surviving. There was also a famous 19th-century hoax memorialised in the Eden Killer Whale Museum, where a man supposedly survived inside a whale for three days.

However, this was impossible because “a human would not fit down the oesophagus,” Pirotta said, as a humpback’s throat is roughly the size of a tennis ball or human fist and can only expand slightly.

Once something is swallowed by a baleen whale, Pirotta said, there is no way out except through the digestive process.

“If you were to go through the oesophagus, pretend you’re a krill, there’s only one way out, and it’s not pretty, it’s the poo slot,” Pirotta said. “Whales don’t have a gag reflex so it’s a one-way trip.”

Pirotta said humans could end up in the mouths of bigger baleen whales such as humpbacks and blue whales, but many baleen whales were too small.

Toothed whales such as sperm whales or orcas do not open their jaws wide enough to fit humans and do not swallow their prey whole.

There were no cases of orcas or other toothed whales attacking humans, Pirotta said, but in theory it would be more akin to a shark bite.

Whales are in far more danger of being injured by being struck by a ship or boat, or entangled in fishing gear.

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