What are your chances of survival do you have to be accidentally swallowed by a whale?
Close calls with whales happen more often than you would possibly expect. And although the people in these videos got away relatively unscathed, there’s no denying that they were just meters off from becoming a whale’s lunch.
But what would happen if they hadn’t been so lucky? Could a person’s body survive being swallowed by a whale? Has it ever happened before?
If you’ve never seen a whale up close, it’s hard to grasp just how monstrous they will be. to place it in perspective, the whalebone whales that the largest animal on the planet! Its tongue alone weighs the maximum amount of an elephant, and it can fit anywhere between 400 and 500 people in its mouth.
But we wouldn’t worry about one in every one of these guys swallowing us anytime soon, because their anatomy makes it nearly impossible. Instead, we must always be more concerned with their smaller cousins, sperm whales.
In 1891, reports emerged that a person had been swallowed by one among these whales, and although he lived to inform the story, he would never be identical again…
According to the story, James Bartley was swallowed when a whale attacked his ship, and he wasn’t retrieved until the subsequent day. When the crew found and killed the whale, they quickly brought it on board their ship and cut it open, revealing an unconscious but very alive James Bartley.
His face and arms were bleached white, and he was blind, all due to the stomach acids of the whale. However, as the years went along, people started poking holes during this story and questioned whether James had been swallowed by a whale.
I mean, wouldn’t the stomach acids do more damage than simply bleaching his skin? Well, with the ability of science, we took a better look, and we quickly discovered that if you get swallowed by a whale, returning out with shiny white skin would be the smallest amount of your worries
Okay, therefore the very first thing you’d worry about once you were swallowed would be getting shredded to pieces by the sperm whale’s impressive set of teeth. Each tooth is approximately 20 centimeters long, that’s about the length of a median chef knife, and whales have anywhere from 40 to 50 of those.
Let’s say you’re lucky enough to create it past all of them, next you’d begin your descent down the throat. Not only would it not be dark and slimy down here, but you’d also find it hard to breathe because of the shortage of oxygen and a rise in methane gas.
As the whale’s throat muscles constricted in and bent help force you down, you’d also start to feel acidcommencing to eat away at your skin. I do know what you’re thinking, we just got into this whale, and James Bartley’s story already seems pretty fishy. Well, you’re not wrong, but where would be the fun in stopping now???
So, next, you’d be dropped into the primary, and largest, of the whale’s four stomachs. You’d probably be in there for a long time, but the intense side is you may have some light within the variety of a bioluminescent squid or two being noshed on after your arrival (sperm whales love the neon flying squid).
You’d better enjoy this brief exhibit, because after this you’d just be tossed from one stomach to the subsequent, with the acids breaking down most of your body until you’re just a bunch of bones being unceremoniously ejected from the whale’s anus.
So yeah, it’s pretty safe to mention that there’s no way you may be swallowed whole by a whale and live to inform the story. Sorry, James. you’llareready to fool people within the 1890s, but we’re on to you now.
For as vast as they’re and as monstrous as they may seem to us, whales even have no interest in eating humans. And if they may talk, they might probably make a degree of telling us that.