ExtinctZoo - Here's What Happens When A Whale Swallows You

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Whale's may be the gentle giants of the oceans, but if one accidentally swallows you, it ain't gonna feel too gentle.

It's a nice enough morning, the water's flat, and you're swimming a couple hundred meters off the coast. Don't ask me why. When all of a sudden, the ocean does something the ocean isn't supposed to do. Bulge, and before your brain is finished flooding your body with stress hormones and probably a scream, the surface opens up, and something bigger than a bus, comes straight up through the exact patch of water you're floating in and takes you, and whatever else was nearby you. In other words, congratulations. You have been swallowed by a whale.

And that's fine and dandy and all, but the real question is, What happens now? What happens when a whale swallows a person whole? And here's the thing. We're supposed to have an answer to that already, because it happened over a century ago. There's this guy named James Bartley. And in 1891, he was working aboard a whaler,

called the Star of the East, somewhere off the Falkland Islands, when the crew harpooned a sperm whale. And then the chaos that followed, the whale flipped over one of the boats, and there went Bartley into the water, with the understandably pissed off whale, and he simply never came back up.

Now, the crew managed to rescue other survivors, but they found nothing of our young Bartley, and thus concluded that the man was spending an extended stay in Davy Jones' locker, i.e., he was gonzo. But later, once the injured whales succumbed to its injuries, the sailors started butchering it, and they noticed something odd. The stomach. It was moving. And so they did, as any self-respecting curious sailor would do,

they cut it open, and suddenly, there goes James Bartley, just falling out. Unconscious, but alive. Supposedly, after this, he spent a few weeks out of his mind, apparently raving and thrashing, so essentially a modern politicianry enactment, but when he finally stopped the Politician Act, he was able to tell them everything, that he remembered the mouth coming to grab him, the teeth had stabbed him, and then that he was sliding down something slick and warm into its stomach. Upon arrival, he could in fact breathe, but the air was so nasty and disgusting that it made him pass out.

And so there he was for hours, and by the time he came out of it, he was permanently scarred, seeing that his hair was gone, his skin bleached, and was made blind, all by what was surely the immensely powerful whale's stomach acid. So a great story, no doubt. It ran in the newspapers, got picked up and reprinted, published around the world, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, there's even a decent chance that you've heard some version of it. And yet, my friends, it's also all completely, absolutely, undeniably made up.

A historian named Edward B. Davis went and did a bit of some good old-school fact-checking. And what he found was that while there was a real ship called the Star of the East, It wasn't a whaler, and in fact had never been a whaler, and there was no James Bartley anywhere on its crew list. And then to really put the whole thing in the ground, or should I say the ocean, the wife of the captain who had sailed with her husband for the entire time he had commanded the vessel, literally wrote, and I quote, There is not one word of truth in the whale story. So yeah, just a bunch of tomfoolery.

But then Davis went further with an actual theory about where this all came from in the first place. Now, in the same year, an actual whale genuinely was killed near Great DeArmouth in England and got carted around the country as an attraction, meaning people paid money to go and look at a dead whale, truly elevated entertainment. And the whale itself was about 30 feet long, and it was also a roerquall, meaning a type of baleen whale, which therefore also has a belonging to perhaps the one group of whales on this planet that is the most physically incapable of swallowing a human relative to their size that has ever existed. and for reasons which we're going to get into some detail.

Yet, even disregarding all of that, there's even signs of this BS, or should I say WS, that was built into the story itself, such as, for example, that Bartley is said to be able to breathe and that his hair was literally dissolved and skin bleached due to the acid. But that cannot really happen. As a sperm whale, the whale that supposedly swallowed him, has an airway which is not actually connected to its mouth, and therefore no air for James. and certainly not hours worth of air. On top of that, as it so turns out, the first chamber of a whale's stomach is essentially as acidic as tap water.

Terrifying, I know. And even if it was acidic, hair is essentially impossible to dissolve by stomach acid anyways, with it instead being weak against high bases, not acids in particular. So yes, fake as fake can be. But that did give me thinking, what would actually happen if it did really happen? So let me attempt to answer that. But first off, let me just set the premise here. The whale often depicted as swallowing people is a baleen whale, like the dead one paraded, and generally a humpback.

Now, baline whales are filter feeders, as you might know, which therefore means that they don't eat large animals, and as such, have gotten a reputation for being a gentle giant. But I think that phrase might be underselling them just a bit, as the humpback whale is less of a gentle giant and more of a gentle vehicle, let's say. I mean, we are talking about an animal that can weigh up to 40 tons and measure up to 18. meters or 60 feet in length. And the way it eats is by doing something called lunge feeding, which is, as one researcher has described, the largest biomechanical event on the planet. And so here's what that involves. The whale comes up from below the surface, or to the side, at a peak speed of around 3 meters, or 9.8 feet per second, and it then proceeds to open his jaw to nearly 90 degrees, which is to say, all the way. And then it drives set open mouth and speeding body through a patch

of water it has determined contains lunch. And when I say patch, I really should say field. Because a thin whale, another type of baleen whale, engulfs somewhere between 60 and 82 cubic meters in a single gulp, or an average of 71,000 liters, or 18,756 gallons, which for perspective is roughly a backyard swimming pool amount of water, in a single bite, that is. And what's insane, in case swallowing a pool wasn't insane enough, is that in the bigger whale species, the water it takes in actually weighs more than the whale itself does. And just in case you didn't know, bigger whale species is essentially synonymous with the largest animals on the entire planet ever. But here's the part that actually starts to concern you,

you who is about to be swallowed. When that mouth opens, the water is moving, and the water, well, isn't. So momentum gets handed from one to the other, and the whale speed roughly halves, dropping from three meters per second down to one or one and a half. And what that means is that a lunge is essentially an inelastic collision between a whale and the mass it is about to engulf, which is to clarify that how a humpback eats its lunch is essentially, again in case you missed it, a collision. And therefore, if you happen to be floating on top of that not so little aforementioned patch, you now have also become part of said collision.

So with that said, let's do the math. Say our whale is 30 tons, so average size, mind you, moving out again, three-ish meters per second. That means our whale friend is carrying about 135 kilojoules of energy, which for comparison, a Honda Civic doing 30 miles per hour, is carrying less than that. Now, to be fair, you are in the water, so when this whale crash does happen, you get shoved as much as hit, and nowhere near all that energy transfers directly into you. But if the whale's bony part actually hits you, well, not good.

And for this situation in general, we don't even really need to speculate that much, seeing that it's happened before, this time for real, as in June of 2021, a commercial lobster diver named Michael Packard was working in Provincetown, Massachusetts, when humpback took him, or rather collided with him, as we've come to realize. In his description, verbatim, I just felt this truck hit me, and everything just went dark. Now, what a vehicle-sized blunt impact does to a human body is not exactly a mystery, considering that happens a lot, and so you could be looking at rib fractures, often multiple, which in some cases can cause something called flail chest,

which is where a whole segment of your ribcage stops moving with the rest of it, and rather starts moving against it. And then underneath that, you can get pulmonary contusions, which is to say your lungs bruising, filling up, and then giving up on the whole breathing thing, and plenty of other outcomes not compatible with having a fun time. Obviously, this is again a car crash, but if you're not just swept into the mouth

and instead hit by one of the largest bones any animal's ever grown, something tells me it's going to hurt. And that's really all to say that there's at least a chance that you may already be dying. And we are less than a few seconds into this. Now, once the mouth closes, the next part of your oh-so-fun journey begins. You see, a roarquall's throat is pleaded, and those accordion-like grooves running down from the chin are called ventral groove blubber, and they unfold and stretch to hold all those thousands of liters of water.

Therefore, what you are effectively now inside is a humongous bag of seawater. and said bag is now closing. In newsflash, it's going to be dark, very dark, as, well, there's no internal illumination beyond whatever bioluminescent snack, the whale is just swallowed alongside you. But instead of seeing, you will now be feeling the hundreds of baleen plates all around you, which are made of the same hard keratin as your fingernails and hang down from the roof of its mouth like curtains. And in a humpback, each plate is around 0.6 meters or 2 feet long and spaced out about a

centimeter apart. And that's cool and all. But what is actually relevant to you is when these filters start running, let's say. These whales have their accordion throat control down to a T. And he uses said abilities to essentially vomit the water in its mouth outward, forcing those thousands of liters of seawater right back to once it came. The only thing is, this time, it's now going through those long nail curtain-like teeth, with the idea being that every krill, herring, and sand lance gets drained out of the water and left behind as a tasty meal. And guess what? That meal includes you. So, now you are pinned flat against the baline by a wall of water moving fast and heavily,

which is where you run into a now new dangerous problem, and that is that you now cannot breathe. And yeah, that's kind of a duh, since being smacked by a metric butt ton of water that's actively pinning you against an immovable force, i.e. our boy's teeth, does seem rather incompatible with the whole notion of breathing. But here's an interesting fact for you to peruse on while you're essentially dying, which is that that horrific burning sensation in your lungs right now is not actually due to the lack of oxygen,

but rather the excess of carbon dioxide. You see, as carbon dioxide builds up, it has a fun little party trick known as alchemy, except instead of turning lead to gold, it turns your blood into acid, acidic er, which is technically not a real word, but it is now in this channel. And when that happens, your brain stem reads that increase in acidity, and then issues an involuntary order. Breathe. With the first urge to breathe showing up quickly,

and then involuntary diaphragm contractions following just a minute or two afterwards. But mind you, these contraction times were measured on land during a static breath hold. Not when you've literally been swallowed by a whale and are actively drowning. And that takes us back to the lunge itself. So a lunch takes a few seconds to complete,

but then the filter cycle in a humpback whale takes about 17 seconds to complete. And yes, that's not long, but like I said, when the order from your brain arrives, your diaphragm will contract whether you want it to or not. And in the middle of the stress being swallowed by a whale, and pinned by a volume of water more akin to a firefighter's hydrant than to a bath, something tells me it's going to come on quick. And so when you do inevitably breathe, water will slam into your larynx. If you're unlucky,

in some sense, will cause it to shut. And with that, congratulations might be in order. Or rather, the opposite of congratulations, as well as your eulogy, as you're now part of an exclusive group of a minority of people who while drowning have something known as a laryngeospasm, which is essentially when your larynx seizes up, which buys you either a little less than a minute of not drowning or just death, as according to some statistics, up to 10% of drowning victims are actually found without any water in their lungs, due to potentially the larynx spasming so hard and so long

that they die from asphyxiation regardless of if they inhaled water or not. Horrifying, right? But if you do survive that ordeal, and your larynx relaxes, you will now breathe in and breathe in hard. So guess what? You're now inhaling seawater and definitely actively drowning. Which also brings us to a crucial detailed Packard story, which is that again, he was a scuba diver, meaning that he had scuba diving gear, meaning that he had a regulator attached to an air source, which, at least to me, is kind of an important detail.

You, on the other hand, do not have a regulator, so even if the whale surfaces early, because something in its mouth is very obviously the wrong shape, and probably taste disgusting, no offense, and spits you out, you may still be drifting into unconsciousness right about now, which out in the ocean is not the greatest place for that to happen. Regardless though of what happens to you, what I can tell you with near 100% certainty is that there is no world in which you get swallowed.

You see, researchers in Iceland got their hands on some thin whale esophaguses and took them apart. And these animals range from about 15.5 to 19.4 meters long, so 50 to 64 feet, and what they found was that the esophaguses themselves measured between 1.3 to 1.9 meters or 4.2 to 6.2 feet, and that is long, mind you, not wide, with the average width, coming in at a measly 11.8 centimeters or 4.6 inches, with the lumen, meaning the actual hole that food goes through, being even smaller than that. Now, yes, I can already hear what you're thinking, which is that our throats are probably tiny too. You know, I've managed to swallow some pretty big bites of food before, so scale me up to whale size, then I could probably take him easy.

And look, I hear you, big chungus, but the same team went and plotted esophagus size against body mass for a bunch of mammals, humans included, by the way, and worked out what a 50-toned animal's throat ought to measure if it was scaled in the way it does in other mammals. And Drem rolls, please, predicted lumined width for a fin whale, 88 centimeters, or 34 inches. actual lumen width for a fin whale, 6.9 centimeters or 2.7 inches. And yes, before you ask, they also tested whether it stretches. And inflated to maximum, the fin whale's sophagus widened by about 26% to 34% in the anterior segment, i.e. the part that you need to fit through first. So unless you're a literal infant, your shoulders will be just a tad bit too wide here.

And when I say a tad, I mean a lot. And that is exactly why in reality, every version of this story ends up the same way it did for Packard. In other words, with you getting spout in vehement disgust. Okay, so this is the point where you might say, fine. The mist of C.T. A.k.a. Baleen whales might be a no-go, but what about the other types? And that's a fair question. So let's check out the other contenders, the Adta C.T. Meaning the toothed whales. The obvious next call here is orcas. But this is still not super illuminating, because it's kind of a trick question, as if an orca decides to swallow you, it was probably on purpose, in which case you're for sure going to be deaded, regardless they can swallow

you whole or not. And so that kind of just defeats the whole sake of the argument, as this is no Jonah situation, with an instead being more of a Jaws situation. So verdict here is possible, but not likely to happen, and if it does happen, you'd probably be ripped into more comfortable bite-sized pieces first. Yippee. Okay, now to the smaller dolphins and things like porpoises, who will often not be thought of as whales, are in fact, are ones, seeing that they are part of the dantecidi, which again literally means toothed whales. I'm not going to go through the entire list here, but some standouts, such as the largest porpoises, the doll's porpoise, reaches sizes up to about 2.3 meters, so they're definitely not swallowing you whole. No way, Jose. And in the Delphina Day,

we already partially covered with the orcas. Monodontidae, i.e. narwhals and belugas, would never accidentally swallow you, either due to size or due to feeding pattern. However, I would still avoid that tooth if I were you. The beet whales, i.e. Zyphaidae. They're freaks who dive deeper than nearly anything else with lungs, with a cuvier's beaked whale diving to a recorded depth of 2,992 meters, which is the deepest dive ever recorded by a mammal, and completely irrelevant here, seeing that they mainly eat small prey and proportionally have a tiny mouth.

So again, not swallowing you whole. Then there are a few other families that are also part of the Adonta C.T, but they hold members which we would just kind of widely consider as regular old dolphins, at least in size, or different types of pygmy whales. So again, no Jonah action here either. And so after all this deduction, we're left with about one more animal with a gullate white enough to mistakenly swallow a person whole, and that is a sperm whale. But before I go there, I do want to be clear about something,

which is that in every stomach cut open by every whaling fleet across centuries of industrial-scale slaughter, a sperm-wale stomach has conclusively been found to contain a person exactly zero times. So yeah, this is also a situation that would never happen in a hundred years. metaphorically and literally. But fine, fine. I'll ignore the fact that this would never happen and force it to do so at a hypothetical gunpoint. Now, in our hypothetical, the first thing that happens here is you get noticed.

And when I say noticed, I more mean you get screamed at. You see, sperm whale hunt in deep water. Deep water. Up to about two kilometers or 1.24 miles kind of deep. And so that is to say that much of their hunting happens in water where visibility is lacking to say the least. and so they've evolved to be very effective at finding food, which it does through, as I said, screaming at the water.

Now, yes, scientifically this is called echolocation, but sperm oil clicks are the loudest sounds produced by any animal that has ever been measured. So, screaming does just seem a bit more appropriate, with a sound level of 236 decibels having been recorded, which when adjusted for water versus air, comes out to about five and a half times louder than a freaking shotgun, and carries about 280 times more air. energy in the sound wave itself. And yes, you heard that right, no pun intended,

280 times more. And do you, my friend, will be in the beam of said scream. See that rhyme? And because it's so dang loud, you will almost definitely be able to feel it in your body, feeling it before you can see them, in fact. Now, interestingly, as it closes in, the whale will get quieter, which is the opposite of what you might expect, especially considering the whole idea that sperm whale stun their prey with sound. A hypothesis that scientists created after noticing that squid in sperm whale stomachs seem to have no bite marks and no signs of a struggle. Cool theory, surely, and also wrong. Because as I said, it turns out that sperm whales reduce sound levels when getting closer, with a reason being here that they're

essentially switching to a high-resolution mode, meaning that in the last stretch, the whale is looking at you and looking at you very carefully. So obviously in reality, this is where the whole situation ends, because the echo comes back with a very ugly squid shape that any self-respecting whale certainly would not want in their stomach. So, it's here where the whale says goodbye. But we have suspended reality. So in this case, it doesn't. And it's here where I should mention that a sperm whale does not chew its food. In fact, they cannot chew their food. It only has proper teeth and lower jaw, conical ones to be exact. And they're actually not really important for hunting, seeing that sperm whales with deformed jaws or lacking teeth still have been found healthy and fed,

with them instead just inhaling prey whole and the teeth being more so used for male versus male competition. But if they somehow did bite you, that would suck, seeing that they're huge, being up to eight inches long. Bite or not, though, you're now in the mouth after being inhaled and about to get swallowed. But the question is now, is the throat wide enough? And to be honest, I couldn't find the exact measurements here, which I guess comes down to sperm whales, not showing up to Icelandic research stations to be dissected. Wonder why, but we can partially infer it from the recorded prey. So then that begs the question of, what have we pulled out of their stomach?

And the answer to that is big stuff, such as the remains of giant squids and colossal squids, which can measure up to 500 kilograms or 1,000 pounds. And as a cherry on top, whole sharks have also been identified in stomach contents, including some big boys like basking sharks. Juveniles, yes, but they were still over 2 meters. And so combining this with the fact that it literally cannot chew its prey, in other words, a feeding strategy where you need your throat to play nice, yeah, you could definitely get swallowed, and probably pretty dang easily at that too. So now you're in the esophagus, nice work.

The first thing you'll notice here if you, some haven't passed out due to fear, is the heat, seeing that the sperm whale is a glorious member of mammal kind, and therefore the inside of a sperm whale will most likely be a lot warmer than the surrounding water. But as you're basking the warmth of the whale, and likely the output of the animal, and likely the output of the animal, and therefore, involuntary loss of your bladder comes the first muscle contraction. You see, the esophagus is not simply a tube. It's a muscular tube designed to move things into the stomach. And this is where things get very dangerous, very fast, as if they weren't already. The Icelandic research team I mentioned earlier calculated that the circular muscle in a finwell esophagus can generate at the interior segment around 17.3 kilopascals. Now, a kilo-pastole is a unit of measurement for pressure. But what that

translates to differs incredibly much in what we're talking about. For example, 17.3 kilo-pascals due to fluid immersion is basically nothing. You're chilling. On the flip side, 17.3 kilopascals of an external squeeze in every part of your body by a muscular dense object is very much not chilling. For example, this amount of force in your chest will be something like 265 kilograms or 580 pounds of weight. And then if we scale that across the entire body, you get something like over three tons of force being acted upon you, which regardless, this pressure is well above the point you can breathe. And to mind you, this is the estimation for a thin whale, i.e., those whales which we established, could not swallow you in the first place. Not an animal literally designed

to swallow large prey whole. As for how long this slide of death takes, well, within humans, the speed maxes out at around 4.9 centimeters a second, or 1.9 inches at the fastest point, seeing that speed in the esophagus differs depending upon the segment. Now this is in humans, like I said, but seeing that most mammals fall within similar bands, let's just take that fastest speed, the 1.9 inches or 4.9 centimeters, and then make it 50% faster just to be conservative. So, if the math is mathing, it would take about a single food item, in other words, you, about 26 seconds to clear the longest thin well esophagus they measured.

And again, that's me being conservative. And yes, yes, obviously that's a fin whale, not a sperm whale. But hey, blame the lack of whale esophagi research. Not me. Now, I already know what you're thinking. But dude, people have been able to hold their breath for far longer than that, seeing that the record for a breath hold without pre-breathing pure oxygen is 11 minutes and 35 seconds. But look, that was set by a man who prepped for this.

Nay, was born for it, and was completely emotionless, not being eaten by a whale and likely crushed. So that's all to say, good luck, pal. So, by the time you actually arrive in the stomach, you're not going to see a room with furniture, because you're almost certainly unconscious already, or just dead. Oh, and because they can't chew,

the first stomach chamber is actually designed to crush food. So even if, somehow against all odds you're conscious, you'd probably wish you weren't. On the bright side, though, there's also no vat of acid. Yet, as I alluded to, a cetacean stomach has multiple compartments, and the first one is the four stomach. which has no digestive glands in it at all.

It's basically just a thick muscular bag. And seeing that for some reason, somebody actually went and measured what's in there, we know that at least in Mink Whales, the four stomach content comes out to about a pH of 6.43. So, mildly spicy water. Now past it, you have the fundic chamber, and this is where those acid vat-producing glands finally show up. Oddly, though, measurements of this area come out to a pH of around 5.26 in minks.

So again, not even that acidic. though this is a post-mortem number, so it is probable that the stomach's acid had already started to neutralize. Eventually, though, you will reach the pyloric chamber, which runs the lowest pH of the lot at about 3.6. So, acidic, but still less than even humans. Yet, regardless, you'll be a goner long before that, and it'll get the job done anyways. Oh, and no, by the way, you're probably not alone in there. And no, I'm not referring to the fact that there's other half-degested prey, because, yeah, there is definitely that too. but no, what I'm instead referring to is the fact that there is other, living things, in here.

For instance, placenta nema, gigantisma, is a giant nematode that parasitizes the tissue of the sperm whale, generally the placenta and the reproductive tissue. But hey, there's definitely plenty of other parasites where they came from. And seeing these nightmare-inducing behemoths get up to 8.4 meters or 28 feet long, yeah, let's just stop there. So moral of the story is, you're dead, and, uh, don't get swallowed by a sperm whale. But I will note one thing, which is that sperm whales cannot digest squid beaks, so thousands of them just accumulate in the gut. And occasionally, the gastrointestinal tract deals with this irritating mass by encasing the whole lot in a waxy secretion.

The resulting mass is something known as ambergris. And this stuff is highly prized, as despite whale stomach gunk not sounding particularly appealing to me, people do in fact buy this stuff, mainly to make perfume. So that's all to say that the theoretical best case outcome of the scenario, besides it spitting you out in the first place, is that some tiny fraction of your bones end up contributing to the production of a lump of whale intestinal wax, and in the future, might then contribute to a bottle of perfume. So have fun being a bottle of highly aromatic fluid. Thanks for watching, and until next time.