Can a whale swallow a human? Here’s why you need not worry

Two families of whales

There are mainly two families of whales: baleen whales and toothed whales. There are 14 species of baleen whales including blue whales, humpback whales, and grey whales. Instead of having teeth, these whales have baleen, which is essentially a filter-feeding system inside their mouth. Baleen is made of keratin — the same protein that makes up human hair and fingernails. Baleen whales use this system to filter small prey such as krill, plankton, and small fish from the water.

Toothed whales have teeth. There are more than 70 species of these whales including sperm whales, beaked whales, killer whales, and dolphins. “These whales have teeth and actively hunt larger prey such as fish, squid, and sometimes even seals,” Anaïs Remili, a researcher at Simon Fraser University (Canada), wrote in a blog post on her website Whale Scientists. Notably, toothed whales do not use their teeth to chew food. They use teeth to usually grab their prey and swallow it whole.

To swallow or not to swallow

Both baleen whales and toothed whales cannot swallow humans. Although their mouth is huge, their throat is much smaller — a humpback’s throat is roughly the size of a human fist. Toothed whales have a larger oesophagus than baleen whales. However, they are also incapable of swallowing an entire human.

Sperm whales are an exception to this. They are the only whales in the world which have large enough throats to swallow a human. But it is “a billion to one thing” for a sperm whale to swallow a human, in part because encounters are so rare, according to a report by National Geographic.

So why did a humpback whale briefly swallow Simancas? Dianna Schulte, a co-founder and director of research at the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation in New Hampshire (USA), told The New York Times in an email, “Humpbacks often feed in the manner seen in the video, by charging to the surface with their mouth open to capture concentrated prey (small fish or krill)… It likely did not know the kayaker was above it, especially given the cloudy conditions and the assumed concentration of the prey.”

As humpbacks rely primarily on their hearing, and small, motorless vessels such as kayaks make very little sound, there is a possibility that the whale did not know that the kayak was there, according to Schulte.