I’m not sure why, but this story has a familiar ring to it. Off the coast of Chile, Adrián Simancas was kayaking in the cold Pacific waters when he was approached by one of the sea’s great creatures – a humpback whale. What happened next, well, it’s a whale of a story.
A humpback whale swallowed a man on a kayak off the coast of Chile last week, before he was quickly able to get out of the leviathan’s mouth unharmed.
Video shows the death-defying and terrifying moment from last Saturday, when Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father, Dell, in Bahía El Águila near the San Isidro Lighthouse in the Strait of Magellan, off Chilean Patagonia.
As Simancas was paddling in what appeared to be an inflatable kayak, a humpback whale rolled on the surface with its mouth open, swallowing the kayaker.
Moments later, the tail broke the surface and the whale dove to deeper depth. Simancas and his yellow kayak then resurfaced after being freed from the clutches of the whale’s jaws.
OK, I’m going to be pedantic here for just a moment; I don’t like to correct a fellow journalist, so I’ll just power through it. Trust me, I have a good porpoise in doing so. See, the term “swallow” is a canard. The whale didn’t swallow the kayaker. A humpback whale is a filter feeder; they eat small fish, plankton, and krill, small creatures. Their esophagus is only about four inches across. They couldn’t swallow a human if they wanted to. From the video, it looks like what this whale is doing is “lunge feeding.”
I’ve observed whales doing this in Cook Inlet and Resurrection Bay. In lunge feeding, a humpback opens its mouth wide, then speeds – lunges – through a concentration of small fish or krill. Sometimes they approach from beneath, and they can propel their entire heads out of the water. If you’re ever in the position to watch whales feeding, you’re liable to see this behavior for yourself; a watched pot never boils, after all, but sometimes a watched whale breaches.
From this video, it looks like the humpback was lunge feeding, took the man and kayak in its cavernous mouth for just a moment, then spit him out. It’s still a fin-tastic thing that the kayaker was able to get out unharmed, but he was never in any danger of being swallowed.
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Here, watch:
You can see clearly that the kayaker rested in the whale’s mouth for a moment and then was promptly spat out – it’s almost as though the whole thing was orca-strated. The whale had plenty of its preferred diet around, after all, and even if it could have swallowed Senor Simancas, he wouldn’t be so shellfish.
What’s more, whales are intelligent animals. While you’re not likely to see one on television, say, on a game show – Whale of Fortune, perhaps – a whale is smart enough to know when something outside its prey range has been ingested, and to quickly spit it out.
So, here we have an interesting tale – a whale tale – and, fortunately, everyone involved came out unscathed. The whale and the kayaker have preserved their whale-being, and it’s safe to say we can write the whole thing off as a fluke.
I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to tip your servers.
