Bodies Remodeled for a Life at Sea
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The medical community has been repeatedly made to look foolish whenever they've speculated on what is and isn't possible for freedivers. These people are no doubt excellent freedivers from the many years of practice they have with it, but nothing in the article suggests they're capable of anything that us normal human cannot do.
FWIW, my PB is 55m (~180 ft), and with a bit more regular training, I feel confident I can go another 15m or so.
Diving itself might somehow enlarge the spleen. There are plenty of examples of experience changing the body, from calloused feet to bulging biceps.
Only some Bajau are full-time divers. Others, such as teachers and shopkeepers, have never dived. But they, too, had large spleens, Dr. Ilardo found. It was likely the Bajau are born that way, thanks to their genes.
However, if you look at humans overall, apparently even these "enlarged spleens" are much smaller than the average spleen:
>"The mean splenic dimensions were ... 333.6 ± 116.1 cm2 in volume." https://www.ajronline.org/doi/abs/10.2214/ajr.184.1.01840045
[1] http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674%2818%2930386-6
EDIT:
They write:
>"We made ultrasound measurements in two planes such that we were able to calculate spleen volumes according to the methodology outlined in Yetter et al. (2003)"[1]
So lets look at Yetter 2003 for their spleen volumes, in table 2 it shows they are >500 cm^3 on average: https://www.ajronline.org/doi/abs/10.2214/ajr.181.6.1811615
So it looks like these "super spleen divers" actually have relatively small spleens...
>"Normal cadaveric splenic volumes reported by Loftus et al. [8] are 26–250 cm3 with a mean volume of 110 cm3 and an SD of 70 cm3. Henderson et al. [19] reported a normal splenic volume of 219 cm3 as calculated from axial CT acquisitions."
So an average of 219 cm^3 according to axial CT is still larger than what is seen here. I'm not sure about the cadaver spleens, do they shrink? The Loftus paper only reports maximum length vs actual volume so we can't see that direct correlation.
Some other papers report 184 cm^3 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4549594/) and 214.6 cm^3 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9038125)
“I would think, as morbid as it is, that if they didn’t have this, it would kill them,” she said.
Yeah, and by a similar leap of logic, if we didn't have two legs, we'd flop around on the land like fish.
One could say "it just takes training" for anything that someone becomes really good at. It just takes training to become an Olympic athlete too, but there are only so many of those and their abilities seem almost super-human at times.
And just for some perspective on what someone who is naturally predisposed to the sport can achieve, I took AIDA 3 with a guy who had taken the courses nearly back-to-back. This meant that he went from untrained to diving to 40m and a 4+-minute static hold in a matter of three weeks.
I guess my overall point is that people with no experience in diving over-mythologize diving ability because the human body is so adaptable that fairly routine changes appear super-human to those that have never experienced them.
A larger spleen means more time and more activity underwater even if they don't dive for longer. Someone that's say 3% better at finding food is at a significant advantage over a lifetime.
Do you need to worry about Benz as you come up?
No, no bends. Unless you have been diving scuba earlier the same day. As you don't breathe deep down, only bring air from the surface in your longs, it won't happen.
What you should be worried about is shallow water blackout when ascending. So never hyperventilate, never push your limits, and never dive alone. Limits to breath holding should be pushed on land instead.
Freedivers can have nitrogen absorption issues if they make too many dives in too short a period. A good freediving computer will alert you when you're approaching your limits. What makes it less of an issue than for scuba divers is less the not breathing at depth part and more the spending less time at depth part. Even a scuba diver would have fewer nitrogen absorption issues if they only spent a few minutes at depth. You're also missing the nitrogen narcosis danger, and freedivers have more narcosis issues than recreational divers because of the greater depths.
Everything in your last paragraph is sage advice, though you can push your breath hold limits at the surface or in a pool as long as you have a trained partner who knows how to handle a blackout. Static holds need to be trained wet before deep diving and dynamic holds can be safely trained horizontally to take pressure changes out of the equation.
Is this really "news"?