'I was completely inside': Lobster diver swallowed by humpback whale
capecodtimes.com
capecodtimes.com
"So I was just picking up strawberries in the backyard and all of a sudden this giant winged cockroach appears out of nowhere and before I know it that goddamn thing is in my mouth!!! Dammit I can still taste it. It's something you can't forget..."
So I suspect the conversation was more about "I almost killed a human! Oh noes!"
It's possible the whale doesn't have the ability to clean its mouth as well underwater?
They are going to try to spit out anything they swallow that is bigger than their normal food. My guess would be that it surfaced because that means less water resistance when trying to shake the large non-food item out of its mouth.
It may have been aware that it was a human, but I have some doubts. If it saw that a human (or really anything larger than it can eat) was amidst the prey it was about to make an eating pass on I'd expect it to either wait for the large thing and prey to separate or would switch to a different target. It would only try to eat that prey if it didn't see the human.
When those whales start their eating run their eating apparatus expands to take in a lot of prey (they often eat schools of small prey). When it expands the whale can no longer see what is in front of it. Finding a human (or other large thing) in its mouth during/after a food run would come as a complete surprise to it. I doubt that its sense of feeling inside the mouth is sufficiently discerning to tell a human from any other similar sized animal or from an inanimate object.
It may be smart enough to reason that there were humans in the general area and that it didn't see any other large animals and that it was an area that it knew didn't have any large inanimate objects and so infer that the thing it got most likely is a human, but I'd expect at that point it is too busy thinking "THERE'S SOMETHING BIG IN MY MOUTH!" and "HOW THE HECK DO I GET RID OF THIS!!!". Reasoning about what it was would come after it deals with that.
My understanding is that the whale's mouth balloons open for feeding during a pass, blocking their forward vision. This is a significant cause of them getting stuck in nets.
This guy's luck is clearly maxed out. What a crazy pair of stories.
As always true wisdom is found in country songs:
If the Phone Don't Ring, You'll Know It's Me
-Rusty Ford -- My Truck, My Dog, and You
This was more akin to getting stepped on by a giraffe that didn’t see you there. Total accident.
Ha! "I was completely inside" What else needs to happen for you to think there might be an element of being unsafe? The man was swallowed by a whale, I don't care if whales are aggressive or not, if anything can swallow me whole I consider that a bit unsafe.
> This was more akin to getting stepped on by a giraffe that didn’t see you there.
So you also consider hanging out near giraffes to be completely safe knowing they might accidentally step on you?
That's a very interesting definition of safety.
I think what you want to say is that animals like whales are friendly and we shouldn't harm them. Point taken.
If a thing happens once, you decide it's categorically unsafe? Not a freak accident?
Must be rough for you to actually do anything, given the how many possibilities there are to accidentally die doing basically anything.
In my very limited experience (4 or 5 day safari in Kruger), Giraffes are pretty shy, but you really want to avoid startling them or otherwise putting them in a situation where they feel a need to defend themselves or their young.
Well, you don't know what you're missing, and it might be part of your problem. Just say'n.
Funnily enough, I am a Leo.
For the record, it’s estimated that American deer hunters have a success rate between 6-13%, depending on the method and state. So lions are apparently more consistently successful hunters than humans with guns.
Ostrich: They're not bright - the bird's eyeball is bigger than its brain. Last ostriches that I saw were a whole herd that came up to the fence with open mouths in anticipation of snacks, which was kinda cute. I guess a large male could get aggressive and the kick would be very nasty?
Hipppo: Very dangerous. They may be herbivorous but they're aggressive and territorial. They will flatten you if they're in a bad mood, and they're almost always in a bad mood. A hippo is 2 tons of bastard; and don't bother running, they're faster than you, on land or in water. Best to avoid them entirely.
I'm not joking, google "most dangerous large animal in Africa", read about hippos and how they kill more humans than any other African animal larger than a mosquito.
Elephants are mostly safe, except the male ones occasionally snap and hunt humans. So…
Focusing in on Stingrays, the number of confirmed deaths by stingrays is maybe as high as 30 ever. Yes, Steve Irwin was one of them, but that doesn’t magically move the statistics, it just makes it more salient.
For comparison, coconuts kill 150 or so people per year. In a real, measurable way, taking a nap under a coconut tree is more dangerous than swimming with a stingray.
I also agree that there is a level of personal responsibility that can’t be abstracted away to just the perpetrators
And finally, sometimes people just get eaten
How would you phrase it? "Eaten by a whale?" Is that less victim blame-y?
> Shouldn't have been in the ocean.
You can swim in the ocean just don't go near where the whales are, it might just help with not becoming a victim of whales' constant eating habit and as a result alleviate the tendency to make greatly exaggerated sarcastic remarks.
He didn’t even know the whale was around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgHxFNFWlZc&ab_channel=mathy...
[0] https://candleberryinn.com/whale-watching-brewster-ma/
[1] https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-seaworld-san-diego...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah#Scientific_speculation
>In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists, interpreting the Jonah story as a historical account, became obsessed with trying to identify the exact species of the fish that swallowed Jonah. In the mid-nineteenth century, Edward Bouverie Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, claimed that the Book of Jonah must have been authored by Jonah himself and argued that the fish story must be historically true, or else it would not have been included in the Bible. Pusey attempted to scientifically catalogue the fish, hoping to "shame those who speak of the miracle of Jonah's preservation in the fish as a thing less credible than any of God's other miraculous doings".
Swim in an ocean, walk outside, or keep breathing: there's a specific set of risks associated with every type of activity.
Ocean risks include drowning, hypothermia, strong currents, ocean-wave injuries, jellyfish, coral scrapes, Portuguese man o' wars, sea urchins, stingrays, sharks, whales, red/green/brown tides, and lightning.
Remember this guy's name. If you ever meet this guy and he asks if you want to go on a trip with him, I would advise politely declining. You should however, offer to buy him a beer to have him tell his stories.
I'd write the story but evidently we are already background in it.
> For years, he was an abalone diver on the West Coast in
> an area with great white sharks that have a history of
> attacking divers; he lost some friends to the predators.I guess that's life in a quasi-infinite expanse.
And the actor can only be one person :)
"It's a UNIX system. I know this!"
“Better than when I find half a worm.”
Either way, I'd prefer just not to get hit.
Half a human swallowed by a whale is body parts. Half a worm in an apple is half a worm in your mouth. Half a bus hitting you implies more than the bus/human collision and some prior trauma experienced by the people in the bus.
What has social media done to our brains that this is often the first thing people think to say after a near-death experience?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpxOLhuNXfM&ab_channel=Movie...
Arched over me a dismal gloom,
While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by,
And lift me deepening down to doom.
‘I saw the opening maw of hell,
With endless pains and sorrows there;
Which none but they that feel can tell—
Oh, I was plunging to despair.
— H. Melville
In this belly of a whale
Its ribs our ceiling beams, its guts our carpeting
I guess we have some time to kill
- The Mariner’s Revenge Song, The Decemberists
for the deep was closing over me;
seaweed twined about my head
at the roots of the mountains;
I was sinking into a world
whose bars would hold me fast for ever.
Edit: found the boats based on their names https://whalewatch.com/
The Center For Coastal Studies is a brilliant organization that does great work to defend this big critters, as well as Right Whales.
I didn't realize there was still lobster so close to Stelwagon Bank- with the increasing acidity and warming waters folks have had to go closer to Maine for lobster.
Anyhoo, humpbacks are our friends and no one should read this as an "attack"; just a little accident.
(I don't live near the coast, but I do have a 'lobster guy' that hooks me up.)
This sounds like a bit of New England banter. "Here in Maine, we use traps. The troglodites down the cape still dive for them."
See also: Geppetto, Jonah
That big fish ab-do-men
It ain't necessarily so...
Therefore, a whale would not be able to consume a human.
Is a great white shark actually big enough that you could end up inside it’s mouth whole?
All the time my Dad humor brain is screaming "think fast think fast, what pun can you do with Jonah?"
Coming up short AND finding there was no punchline was actually kind of a let down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBpttbTA908 "Jonah and the Grampus"
Hear the rime of the ancient mariner
See his eye as he stops one of three
Mesmerizes one of the wedding guests
Stay here and listen to the nightmares of the seaA whale eats a person and it’s a big deal? Humans and their hubris…
Go vegan.