I wonder what the whale felt. Would it be swimming around telling its disgusted friends a cetacean equivalent of:
"So I was just picking up strawberries in the backyard and all of a sudden this giant winged cockroach appears out of nowhere and before I know it that goddamn thing is in my mouth!!! Dammit I can still taste it. It's something you can't forget..."
Another article I read said that the whale deliberately surfaced, and that these whales typically get along with humans, so it's possible it was very aware of what was happening and was trying to save his life after it accidentally swallowed him.
So I suspect the conversation was more about "I almost killed a human! Oh noes!"
The esophagus of that kind of whale is too small for human to get through, and it's not a toothed whale so it can't really chew its food to make it fit. It only wants to eat things that it can swallow whole.
They are going to try to spit out anything they swallow that is bigger than their normal food. My guess would be that it surfaced because that means less water resistance when trying to shake the large non-food item out of its mouth.
It may have been aware that it was a human, but I have some doubts. If it saw that a human (or really anything larger than it can eat) was amidst the prey it was about to make an eating pass on I'd expect it to either wait for the large thing and prey to separate or would switch to a different target. It would only try to eat that prey if it didn't see the human.
When those whales start their eating run their eating apparatus expands to take in a lot of prey (they often eat schools of small prey). When it expands the whale can no longer see what is in front of it. Finding a human (or other large thing) in its mouth during/after a food run would come as a complete surprise to it. I doubt that its sense of feeling inside the mouth is sufficiently discerning to tell a human from any other similar sized animal or from an inanimate object.
It may be smart enough to reason that there were humans in the general area and that it didn't see any other large animals and that it was an area that it knew didn't have any large inanimate objects and so infer that the thing it got most likely is a human, but I'd expect at that point it is too busy thinking "THERE'S SOMETHING BIG IN MY MOUTH!" and "HOW THE HECK DO I GET RID OF THIS!!!". Reasoning about what it was would come after it deals with that.
> It may have been aware that it was a human, but I have some doubts. If it saw that a human (or really anything larger than it can eat) was amidst the prey it was about to make an eating pass on I'd expect it to either wait for the large thing and prey to separate or would switch to a different target. It would only try to eat that prey if it didn't see the human.
My understanding is that the whale's mouth balloons open for feeding during a pass, blocking their forward vision. This is a significant cause of them getting stuck in nets.
"Ten years ago, while traveling in Costa Rica, he was a passenger in a small plane that crashed in the jungle, killing the pilot, co-pilot and a passenger. Packard sustained multiple serious injuries to his abdomen and upper body. The rescuers that found the remaining five passengers after two nights in the jungle said they wouldn’t have survived another night."
This guy's luck is clearly maxed out. What a crazy pair of stories.
He's still alive, so it sounds like he's got a little credit left on that account. The big creditor in the sky hasn't declined his charges yet.
Remember this guy's name. If you ever meet this guy and he asks if you want to go on a trip with him, I would advise politely declining. You should however, offer to buy him a beer to have him tell his stories.
Yeah, that's addressed in the fine article as well:
> For years, he was an abalone diver on the West Coast in
> an area with great white sharks that have a history of
> attacking divers; he lost some friends to the predators.
Teela Brown from Ringworld. She was the result of a selective breeding program intended to create the luckiest human alive... but it turned out the _real_ lucky ones were all the "failures" who did _not_ get recruited for an impossibly dangerous mission.
That mirrors Orwell's thought when he survived a shot in the neck during the Spanish civil war - everyone kept telling him how lucky he was, but he couldn't help but think it would have been luckier to not have been shot at all!
As I recall (spoiler), that was speculation by one of the other characters after they crashed on Ringworld, later reversed because Teela met the love of her life due to the crash. The real take away was that Teela's luck was in no way transferable to the rest of the party; it only looked out for Teela.
Luck seems to me to be a zero sum game, so if someone is lucky, someone else must be unlucky. It's like a new character on What We Do In The Shadows as a luck vampire.
Perhaps instead luck is a field or fabric permeating or moving through spacetime with concentrated areas of entropy or improbabilities that some people can naturally sense of are drawn towards
He also says he lost some friends to great white sharks on the west coast, which strains credulity, given that there are 2-3 shark attack deaths per decade across the entire west coast.
I mean if you swim in whale's proximity and fly in sketch planes, crazy shit is bound to happen to you. The real tragedy is the stories there is no one left to tell.
Swimming near whales isn’t unsafe at all. They’re not particularly aggressive, a lone human is too small to worry about, and we operate on completely different sections of the food chain.
This was more akin to getting stepped on by a giraffe that didn’t see you there. Total accident.
Giraffes: not really dangerous. They graze on the tops of trees. I don't know much about it, which leads me to think that "giraffe danger" isn't a thing that gets talked about because it's not much of a thing.
Ostrich: They're not bright - the bird's eyeball is bigger than its brain. Last ostriches that I saw were a whole herd that came up to the fence with open mouths in anticipation of snacks, which was kinda cute. I guess a large male could get aggressive and the kick would be very nasty?
Hipppo: Very dangerous. They may be herbivorous but they're aggressive and territorial. They will flatten you if they're in a bad mood, and they're almost always in a bad mood. A hippo is 2 tons of bastard; and don't bother running, they're faster than you, on land or in water. Best to avoid them entirely.
I'm not joking, google "most dangerous large animal in Africa", read about hippos and how they kill more humans than any other African animal larger than a mosquito.
Giraffes can kick lions hard enough to kill them, or at least injure them enough to prevent lions from returning to effective hunting before starving to death.
In my very limited experience (4 or 5 day safari in Kruger), Giraffes are pretty shy, but you really want to avoid startling them or otherwise putting them in a situation where they feel a need to defend themselves or their young.
That’s a pretty ridiculous way to measure predator success. Hunting is a high risk high reward endeavor; a predator can fail to kill in most hunts and still be a very successful species.
For the record, it’s estimated that American deer hunters have a success rate between 6-13%, depending on the method and state. So lions are apparently more consistently successful hunters than humans with guns.
Remember Steve Irwin aka The Crocodile Man? The guy was picking up venomous snakes and wrestling with crocodiles. Then got killed by a "harmless" stingray that operated on a totally different section of the food chain...
Freak accidents happen. If you start drawing conclusions about the risk of various activities and animals from literally one incident, you’ll end up with all kinds of erroneous and silly opinions about what is dangerous and what is not.
Focusing in on Stingrays, the number of confirmed deaths by stingrays is maybe as high as 30 ever. Yes, Steve Irwin was one of them, but that doesn’t magically move the statistics, it just makes it more salient.
For comparison, coconuts kill 150 or so people per year. In a real, measurable way, taking a nap under a coconut tree is more dangerous than swimming with a stingray.
Ha! "I was completely inside" What else needs to happen for you to think there might be an element of being unsafe? The man was swallowed by a whale, I don't care if whales are aggressive or not, if anything can swallow me whole I consider that a bit unsafe.
> This was more akin to getting stepped on by a giraffe that didn’t see you there.
So you also consider hanging out near giraffes to be completely safe knowing they might accidentally step on you?
That's a very interesting definition of safety.
I think what you want to say is that animals like whales are friendly and we shouldn't harm them. Point taken.
You call diving in the ocean and swimming near whales "basically anything"? Diving itself is pretty high risk and the fatality rate isn't as low as you might think. You comparing essential daily activity to recreational diving in whale infested waters as equals is a quite mind boggling.
Given how many "An X Year Old Person Died in This Intersection This Year" signs I pass just going about my day, I don't think the fatality rate of essential daily activity is as low as you might think.
This is like saying people who are attacked by squirrels or crows are to blame for going outside. Did you know there are squirrels and crows outside? Did you read that one article about that one person getting dive bombed by a crow? Obviously you have only yourself to blame if you go outside.
How would you phrase it? "Eaten by a whale?" Is that less victim blame-y?
> Shouldn't have been in the ocean.
You can swim in the ocean just don't go near where the whales are, it might just help with not becoming a victim of whales' constant eating habit and as a result alleviate the tendency to make greatly exaggerated sarcastic remarks.
In the ocean, the whales stick within the designated Whale Zones, marked by vast rings of starfish holding hands (??). When you cross the starfish, as Packard must have, then you’re clearly in the Zone. At that point you have no one to blame but yourself when you get accidentally swallowed.
Naah, that is the old way/conception of confinement, in modern, eco-zoo-friendly, countries whales are allowed to roam freely in the ocean, it is the swimmers that must wear high visibility vests with a sign "I am not a snack!" written in whalish.
June apparently is the whale watching season in Cape Cod [0]. At least I hope from now on after this "freak accident" people pay a bit more attention and don't confuse things that can swallow them whole with harmless little pets they can cuddle and respect nature and the wild life for what they are. A whale in San Diego Seaworld injures several trainers [1]. A whale kills its trainer [2].
>In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists, interpreting the Jonah story as a historical account, became obsessed with trying to identify the exact species of the fish that swallowed Jonah. In the mid-nineteenth century, Edward Bouverie Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, claimed that the Book of Jonah must have been authored by Jonah himself and argued that the fish story must be historically true, or else it would not have been included in the Bible. Pusey attempted to scientifically catalogue the fish, hoping to "shame those who speak of the miracle of Jonah's preservation in the fish as a thing less credible than any of God's other miraculous doings".
After the worst day of meetings, after not being to track down the most elusive bug, at the end of that day, I absolutely do not have to worry about being eaten whole. So I guess there are worse jobs.
What if it is a short bus? It's half the size of a bus, yet still a whole bus. The joys of fractions. Half of a short bus would be a passenger van. Still a bus? Half of a passenger van would be a mini-van. Half a mini-van would be a SUV. Half an SUV would be a sedan. Half a sedan would be a mini. Half a mini would be a bicycle. Half a bicycle would be a unicycle. Half a uni would be...
No, the… the point is encountering something upsetting is upsetting, but encountering it not intact is traumatic.
Half a human swallowed by a whale is body parts. Half a worm in an apple is half a worm in your mouth. Half a bus hitting you implies more than the bus/human collision and some prior trauma experienced by the people in the bus.
Repeating yourself until you're red in the face that they shouldn't reopen this park for a 3rd or 4th time until your team gets unit testing sorted out but the PMs just aren't having it and the deadline isn't going to budge
I am totally unappreciated in my time. You can run this whole park from this room with minimal staff for up to 3 days. You think that kind of automation is easy? Or cheap? You know anybody who can network 8 connection machines and debug 2 million lines of code for what I bid for this job? Because if he can I'd like to see him try.
Another cameraman got gobbled by a Bryde's whale while he was filming a bait ball off the coast of South Africa a couple years ago. His wife took photos of him while he was half in the whale. Fortunately, the whale spat him out a few seconds later.
As soon as he got out of the whale, he swam up to his wife to ask, "did you get it?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChcEb6mlEUo (worth the watch)
I was relieved when the article said the esophagus was too small to actually be swallowed. Like what do you do if a whale actually swallows you, try to crawl out the other end? Like the Shawshank Redemption but way worse
Woof. I hadn’t even considered, what if the whale dove while you were in it’s mouth before spitting you out! Rapid descent, the bends, oxygen narcosis. Not good! That guys is lucky he was spat out on the surface!
Most whales esophagus are only the size of their prey and they all eat really small stuff largest esophagus of a whale size of a grapefruit. Jonah was supposably swallowed by a big fish that's what it says "fish"
I like to hope that cetaceans are sentient. Given that, I can imagine the poor whale being completely grossed out by whatever it just got in its mouth and tried to spit it out as fast as possible. I've definitely had that experience before.
Oh man, I forgot I sang Jonah’s Song with the BYU Men’s Chorus until you posted those lines. I couldn’t find a recording of us singing it, but here is an excellent recording of another choir singing it:
I just chartered a whale watching tour out of Provincetown the day prior. Our Captain said there’s only been one humpback near by so far and we followed him/her around for a few hours. About half way through a few massive whale watching boats show up. I’ve been on a handful of tours like this before and know there are some rules in place but honestly it was shocking to me how aggressive those other boats were. The whale would surface and they would full throttle straight for it. Getting very close to hitting it in my view (although my perception is a little off around ocean things). Anyways, my family and the captain discussed it quite a bit. We even felt the whale was trying to “shake us” not long after those other boats began this behavior. Interesting that I’m back home in Texas today and seeing this article. I imagine the whale is just a bit tired of people everywhere he turns.
I was on a whale watching tour years ago when the captain noticed a smaller boat tailing us. It appeared to be an affluent family that had chartered the boat to get a closer view of whales. Our captain would kill the engine when in the vicinity of a whale, and we would drift a bit. It was nice because it would get quiet and you could track their movements better. The boat tailing us wasn’t doing the same thing and came precariously close to several whales. The family had high powered cameras and could basically look over the edge and straight down at some of the whales we saw. Unfortunately for them they also broke federal law by being too close under their own power. As we headed home we saw the Coast Guard intercept them. Our Captain had radioed it in. He estimated they were hit with some hefty fines.
That’s essentially what they were doing, roles reversed us being the private charter. Our captain said something to the effect of “if I did that they’d report me” but I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t report them. It seemed to me those bigger boats were actually a threat to harming the whale. Our boat I think not so much (~39’) and we always jumped to the side of the whale whereas the bigger boats cut it off which in my mind increased the odds of a collision.
The Center For Coastal Studies is a brilliant organization that does great work to defend this big critters, as well as Right Whales.
I didn't realize there was still lobster so close to Stelwagon Bank- with the increasing acidity and warming waters folks have had to go closer to Maine for lobster.
Anyhoo, humpbacks are our friends and no one should read this as an "attack"; just a little accident.
I didn't even realize that they were still diving for them. Here in Maine, they trap them. I don't know of anyone that still dives for them and don't think they do it much, if at all, here.
(I don't live near the coast, but I do have a 'lobster guy' that hooks me up.)
I don't know the answer to this, but great whites are massive and definitely you could 'fit' a human in one just from a volume perspective. Whether you could fit into its mouth/throat, I don't know.
You also might not be thinking that clearly if you had just been swallowed alive by a baleen whale. That he was reasoning with any clarity at all, in his situation, is impressive to me.
Anyone know why they dive for them instead of putting creels down? Not sure what creels are called elsewhere but they are like weighted traps that sit on the seabed attached to a line with a buoy at each end.
Living on Cape Cod these days, I read “Burt Dow Deep-water Man” to my son fairly regularly when it’s time for bed. I think this guy just picked up a new nickname for himself.
Hear the rime of the ancient mariner
See his eye as he stops one of three
Mesmerizes one of the wedding guests
Stay here and listen to the nightmares of the sea
You’ve completely changed your comment at least twice [EDIT: thrice], after it got a handful of replies. This is an abuse of the edit button and is basically not cool.
Yeah, it's not like this guy claimed to be in the belly of the whale for 3 days. Could you imagine the response to that title? Surely, nobody would have the gall to make up a story like that and spread it around like gospel.
So a brother and sister claim he got swallowed by a whale and spit out seconds later and we just obviously believe them? Can someone shed more light on what evidence there is or any eyewitnesses attesting that this actually happened and that it isn't a prank by a couple of siblings reliving father Geppetto?
Well, the article says that EMS transported him to the hospital, so it would seem likely that he had something happen to him, or if he'd been completely uninjured it would have raised red-flags either on scene, or later at the hospital. Beyond that, whether or not the event unfolded exactly as he described or not is something that probably only he (and the whale) will ever really know.
I mean he does mention he didn't feel any teeth while inside and that's how he knew it wasn't a shark. So what wounds or physical signs would anyone expect to see in the hospital from being in a cushy whale mouth?
It seems pretty unlikely to me, given that he said he’s lost multiple friends to great white sharks while he lived on the west coast. There are maybe 2-3 shark attack deaths per decade on the west coast, spread across a huge area. I have a hard time believing he was friends with multiple of them, and was in the described plane crash, and was gobbled by a whale.
"So I was just picking up strawberries in the backyard and all of a sudden this giant winged cockroach appears out of nowhere and before I know it that goddamn thing is in my mouth!!! Dammit I can still taste it. It's something you can't forget..."