Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/16/what-would-happen-if-you-were-swallowed-by-a-sperm-whale.html
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I’ve always been interested how in popular imagination, you’d be inside some great hollow space inside the whale, with its ribs over you:
Pinocchio
Mickey Mouse
We are two mariners
Our ships’ sole survivors
In this belly of a whale
Its ribs are ceiling beams
Its guts are carpeting
I guess we have some time to kill
Mariner’s Revenge, The Decemberists
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What would happen if you were swallowed by a sperm whale?
You’d have a whale of a time?
(Answer: NOT)
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What, no mention of being crushed as its rib cage collapses when it dives? It’s one of their amazing adaptions, including both lungs and stomach folding in on themselves and squeezing out all the air as they head for (checks) 3,000 meters (~10,000 feet) underwater. I suppose it would be a race between suffocation, digestion, and crushing, depending on circumstances.
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There’s a book about that! And probably a movie before too long.
Whalefall by Daniel Kraus. Amazing read, very worth it.
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This was one of my favorite books when I was little:
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Contributed by Popkin.
Obvious answer:
You’d die, very unpleasantly.
I guess some folks might be morbidly curious about what such a death would entail, but not I.
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C’mon, you just start a fire and get sneezed out. Kids books and movies should have prepared you for this.
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Next up, what would happen if you swallowed a sperm whale?
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Here’s a trip down memory lane for those of us who watched MTV in the 80’s.
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This is the set-up for a very dirty joke, isn’t it?
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I was under the impression that despite their size, whales have narrow throats a human couldn’t possibly fit through. Or maybe that was only baleen whales?
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Came here to say this. An absolutely riveting read.
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Whales are probably smart enough that if you just keep your head and describe being swallowed as “a real dick move” a sperm whale will go “I understood that reference” and then probably bite down harder with a “Justice for Moby!”.
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What now?
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I assumed that the whale didn’t appreciate the pun about a “dick move,” referring, I assume to Moby Dick.
That is, assuming the pun isn’t still referring to sperm, which, incidentally, gets talked about an awful lot in Moby Dick.
Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! All the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed the sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. …
Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!
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I know people who get swallowed by a whale every day.
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If you were on scuba, wearing a protective drysuit and in possession of a dive knife, I wonder if the outcome would still be death?
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