Can You Get Actually Swallowed By A Whale? Here’s The Real Science Behind Whalefall

Austin Abrams is having a challenging year. After stumbling into this September’s Raccoon City outbreak, he’s now been swallowed alive by a whale.

Whalefall, based on Daniel Kraus’ 2023 novel, sees a young man named Jay Gardiner go scuba diving to recover his father’s body, only to get entangled with a giant squid as it’s eaten by a sperm whale. Trapped in the whale’s stomach, Gardiner must find a way out before he asphyxiates. It’s a survival scenario as intense as it is absurd, but could it ever happen in real life? The answer is simple: kinda, maybe, technically, but no, probably not.

“We think sperm whales feed using suction,” Dr. Anaïs Remili tells Inverse. “A big gelatinous squid is very easy to suck. If you’re a human being, it becomes complicated.”

A Whale of a Tale

Whales have been swallowing protagonists since Jonah’s day, but our most famous examples are a biblical parable and a story about a talking puppet, neither of which was written with the finer points of marine biology in mind.

Still, the possibility fascinates us. In the late 19th century, newspapers told the factually dubious tale of James Bartley, who supposedly survived for days in a whale’s stomach before being rescued by hunters. Just last year, Venezuelan kayaker Adrián Simancas was accidentally scooped up by a humpback whale… and promptly spat out.

Simancas, respectfully, probably wasn’t very appetizing, as humans aren’t on a humpback’s diet. Dr. Remili, a marine ecotoxicologist at Simon Fraser University, explains that there are two types of whales: toothed and baleen.

“Toothed whales have teeth like any carnivore we’re used to seeing,” Remili says. “Baleen whales have comb-like, keratinous structures instead of teeth. They’re mostly used for filter-feeding.”

Humpbacks and other baleen whales feed on small crustaceans and fish, like anchovies and sardines. As Remili explains, they’ll “engulf water and prey. The baleen filters the water and retains the food. In Antarctica, for example, humpbacks feed on enormous quantities of krill. They’ll filter it out and swallow this thick paste of krill, like a gross, fatty milkshake.”

Simancas was never in danger of being swallowed — as the BBC reported, a humpback’s throat is no wider than a household pipe. But it’s with toothed whales, like the sperm whale Austin Abrams is battling in theaters, where the story becomes theoretically possible.

“In the case of an enormous male sperm whale, a human may potentially fit inside their throat,” Remili says. “But I don’t think it’s a likely scenario because sperm whales are known to feed at enormous depths, sometimes thousands of meters under the surface. And we know they select their prey with echolocation. A human being does not look like their typical prey.”

In fact, Remili notes that “there’s never been a documented case of sperm whale aggression towards a human being.” If one eats us, it would almost certainly be by accident. That’s what happens in Whalefall, as director and cowriter Brian Duffield tells Inverse, “In the movie you can tell the whale is pretty oblivious to the fact that Austin Abrams is around. He’s in the way of lunch.” Kraus, who also cowrote the screenplay, says that “the very first thing I did was contact a number of whale scientists and biologists, and unanimously they were like, ‘Yeah, it’s possible.’ Anything that I wanted to do that they said was not possible, I didn’t do it.” But in Remili’s view, there’s one literal sticking point.

“If it’s a massive sperm whale, technically we might fit,” Remili says. “But I think with dive equipment it becomes really complicated. A giant squid is much more pliable than a human skeleton. Squid are very bendy and gelatinous; we’re not made of the same material. And the dive equipment would probably hurt the whale really bad. Even if we could fit through the throat and esophagus, which is theoretically possible, a sperm whale’s stomach is not just one big hole, it’s made of small compartments. We would really stretch what is anatomically possible if the whale decided to swallow us in the first place, but I don’t think that with the dive equipment it would work.”

Roughly speaking, it would be like a human being shoveling a forkful of spaghetti into their mouth, discovering that a cockroach somehow snuck in with it, and deciding to just swallow it whole anyway… all while the roach happened to be wearing a tiny suit of armor. The same equipment that would allow us to get anywhere near a sperm whale’s depth would probably keep us from being edible. None of this means Whalefall is a bad movie, but whales have a more interesting diet than giant squid and the occasional hapless movie character.

Eating Like a Whale

You probably haven’t given much thought as to what and when whales eat, beyond “a lot” and “often.” But while toothed whales really will tackle the occasional giant squid, that’s only one part of a complicated diet.

“Sperm whales have been documented hunting giant squid, and that’s mostly from the enormous tentacle marks that squid have left near a whale’s mouth,” Remili says. “But they don’t consistently go after giant squid. They rely on a wide range of squid and small fish.”

This, for some whales, can involve veritable odysseys to fill their stomachs.

“Some species will fast for a very long time,” Remili says. “Humpbacks, for example, their feeding grounds are close to the poles, where there are giant algal blooms during the summer. They’ll engulf as much as they can for a few weeks and get super fat, like a bear. But instead of hibernating, they’ll travel back to their breeding grounds, which are typically in calm, tropical waters. It’s easier to give birth in warm water, and calves don’t have the blubber needed to survive in cold water. So these whales will use most of their fat reserves to feed their calf and support their travels. Then they’ll go back to the feeding grounds around Antarctica or Alaska and eat as much as they possibly can for weeks.”

While humans may perform comparable feats on Alaskan cruises, the whales’ travel benefits the ecosystems they pass through, because when you’re eating that much, you inevitably give back to the environment.

“Whales engulf large quantities of food, and then as they travel they release feces rich in nitrogen,” Remili says. “This fertilizes algal blooms, which is the foundation of the food web. So whales are redistributing large amounts of nutrients across the ocean. Which is quite amazing — they’re really the engineers of their ecosystems.”

One reason we know this is because, as Remili explains, “some researchers collect feces, which is quite insane on the field; you have to wait for the whale to go to the bathroom and collect whatever remains, and then they use DNA metabarcoding to look at what species we can detect inside the feces.” But whether we’re picking up after whales or just watching them, it’s not practical to study their diets by constantly following them around.

“I focus on killer whales, which are quite interesting in that they exhibit a large range of prey preferences and dietary specializations,” Remili says. “Some just eat fish, others a mix of fish and mammals like seals and porpoises, and some killer whales even target baleen whales. I rely on a small piece of skin and blubber that we collect from whales when we encounter them at sea. I look at the chemical signature inside this tiny sample and compare it to different types of prey, and I try to reconstruct their diet using the information we find in the lipids. It shows you a longer period than when you’re just observing them.”

That’s how we can reasonably estimate what whales are eating even when we can’t follow them across the ocean. Eventually, Remili hopes to determine how whales are adapting to climate change.

“I’ve already used this technique on seals in the Arctic, and we have noticed changes, particularly when there’s low sea ice and the seals can’t feed on their usual prey,” she says. “The seals had a lot of saturated fatty acids in their blubber, which showed us that either their diet was changing or the seals were malnourished. I’m going to be studying baleen whales from Antarctica next; we’re looking at this relationship between climate change and what the whales have fed on.”

Whales, given their crucial place in the food web, are especially vulnerable to climate change, a fact less likely to make headlines than fun movie trailers or their supposed revenge campaign against yachts. Remili understands the power of fiction — she credits a childhood love of Free Willy with drawing her to her field — and stresses that, as we continue to learn more about whales, you don’t really need to worry about them the next time you’re in the water.

“Whales have recently been involved in a few interesting stories,” Dr. Remili says. “We have killer whales ‘attacking’ boats, which has mostly been proven to be juveniles playing with the rudders. Then we have this movie, which shows a very scary version of a sperm whale. As long as people understand that whales in the wild are typically very gentle, I think we’ll be fine. Whales live in social groups, they have a language of their own. They’re not to be feared. We impact their environment a lot more than they impact ours. They suffer from many human threats... entanglement, noise, pollution. But I think people can go diving safely.”

Again, Whalefall is still a fun time in theaters. But maybe Hollywood should get moving on that Free Willy reboot next.