Humpback whales “lunge feed” by quickly lunging through a school of fish with their mouth wide open. … [+]
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A father and son paddling off the coast of Chile last weekend had a terrifying scare when a humpback whale suddenly emerged from beneath the water’s surface and appeared to swallow the son and his yellow boat whole. Thankfully, the massive mammal released the smaller one, who survived unharmed to tell the surreal tale.
“I thought I was dead,” Adrián Simancas told the Associated Press. “I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me. But when I got out I understood that of course it was probably out of curiosity that the whale had approached me or maybe to communicate something.”
That “something” was most likely the simple message that it wanted a snack, says Jooke Robbins, director of the Humpback Whale Studies Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
She, like many others, has watched footage of the incident captured by Simancas’ dad, who happened to be filming nearby at the time and caught the alarming sight on camera. Not at all surprisingly, the dramatic video has gone viral. Whales appearing to swallow humans, after all, aren’t an everyday sight.
“What I see in the video suggests to me that the kayaker was just in the way of a surface-feeding whale,” Robbins said over email. “My guess is that the whale was just as surprised as the kayaker.”
Robbins clarifies that due to the width of their throats, humpback whales aren’t physically capable of actually swallowing something as large as a person, and that this was likely a case of mistaken identity. Humpbacks feed by quickly lunging through a school of fish with their mouth wide open — sometimes at the water’s surface, sometimes out of view — and then filtering the water through their baleen before swallowing the tiny prey.
“The lunge usually happens really fast to catch fast-moving fish,” Robbins said. “If there is something else unexpectedly in the path of their lunge, that can be unintentionally and just momentarily engulfed.”
In this case, it was Adrián Simancas who got engulfed while paddling in a lightweight inflatable pack raft near the San Isidro Lighthouse in the Strait of Magellan in Chilean Patagonia (pack rafters are sometimes referred to as kayakers). The whale spit him out.
“When I came up and started floating, I was scared that something might happen to my father, too, that we wouldn’t reach the shore in time, or that I would get hypothermia,” Simancas said.
It’s Happened To Kayakers Before
While kayakers should definitely be more concerned with hypothermia than turning into a Jonah story, it’s not unheard of for humans and humpbacks to have uncomfortably close encounters.
“About every two years or so someone ends up inside the mouth of a whale,” says Peter Donohue, a kayak instructor in the San Francisco Bay Area and former publisher of the magazine California Kayaker. He cites one incident two years ago of a humpback whale swallowing two women in a kayak, then spitting them out unharmed, and another of a Cape Cod diver who landed in the hospital after being swallowed by a humpback.
Donohue, a teacher with Sea Trek in Sausalito, north of San Francisco, has encountered humpbacks often while out on the water, though he’s never gotten as startlingly close as Simancas did. He describes his interactions with the creatures as awe-inspiring rather than frightening.
“It’s a great experience to be that close to something so large,” he said in an interview. “I think I’ve seen over a thousand humpbacks from kayaks.” He captured one such instance in the video below.
The new viral video from South America is making the rounds in Donohue’s kayak community, he said, with the general reaction being one of amazement, both at the event itself and the fact that it was caught on camera.
And, he laughed, “you get some non-kayakers forwarding it to kayakers saying, ‘Oh, another reason why I don’t want to go on the ocean.’” But he and other paddlers he knows aren’t scared. “The actual risk of this,” he said, “is super small.”
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Publish date : 2025-02-14 12:44:00
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