What happens if you are accidentally swallowed by a whale? Is there a chance of escape?
In 1891, the British whaling ship "Oriental Star" was attacked by whales while hunting, and a crew member named James Bartley unfortunately fell into the whale's mouth, and it took several hours to be found in the whale's belly by other crew members.
At that time, Bartley was already dying, but he was the first person in history to survive the mouth of a whale. Then the British media reported the story, which attracted many doubts:
Can humans really survive whales?
As a deep-sea behemoth, the whale is huge, a blue whale can reach 33 meters in length, weighs 380 tons, weighs as much as an elephant, and can stand 400 to 500 people in its mouth, swallowing a person is a piece of cake!
But in reality, large blue whales do not cause harm to humans.
Because the blue whale belongs to baleen whales, there are no teeth, only baleen like hair, when swallowing food, the whale will open its mouth to swallow the food with the seawater in its mouth, and then close its mouth to filter the seawater out of the whisker seam, leaving small fish and shrimp in its mouth.
Therefore, if unfortunately swallowed by baleen whales, humans will not be torn apart by whale teeth for the first time, but they will not enter the whale's stomach with small fish and shrimp, because the throat diameter of baleen whales is only the size of a golf ball, which cannot accommodate the size of humans, and whales will open their mouths to spit out humans like humans eating fish stuck in fish bones.
However, this does not mean that humans have escaped, because whales will continue to dive 200 meters below sea level after swallowing food, and the current record depth of human diving without equipment is 113 meters. At 200 meters underwater, even if humans escape from the whale's mouth, they cannot escape the shackles of the sea.
But if you encounter toothed whales such as sperm whales and killer whales, the situation is very different. Toothed whales are equally massive, reaching up to 20 meters in length and weighing up to 50 tons.
Most importantly, they have wide throats and can easily swallow large amounts of food, which means that once humans are swallowed by toothed whales, it is difficult to escape.
Taking sperm whales as an example, the moment they enter the mouth of a whale, the first thing humans have to face is two rows of teeth as sharp as dinner knives, and forty or fifty teeth in the whale's mouth are enough to tear any creature to pieces.
If you get away with the whale's teeth, after 1 minute, humans will enter the mucus-filled throat along with other food, which is dark, filled with methane gas, and strangely smelly.
But this is no longer important, because the whale's throat lacks oxygen, at this time humans begin to breathe hard, but because the muscles on both sides of the whale's throat continue to contract, the rate of human decline is still accelerating, at the same time, humans will feel a tingling pain, because the hydrochloric acid of the digestive tract is eroding human skin.
After 5 minutes, the human will descend into the whale's first stomach, which is also the whale's largest stomach. Unlike ordinary animals, whales have 4 stomachs, containing a lot of stomach acid, the human body will toss and turn in these 4 stomachs, corroded by gastric acid, into easily absorbed nutrient solution, and finally only a pile of white bones remain, in the whale's intestine with precious ambergris encountered, together by the whale excreted.
It should be mentioned here that ambergris is actually dried sperm whale intestinal secretions, sperm whales mainly feed on large squid and octopus, but it is difficult to digest their jaws and tongue teeth, as the jaw and tongue teeth continue to accumulate to stimulate the intestine, the intestine will secrete a special wax, the residue wrapped, slowly formed ambergris, after being excreted by whales, after hundreds of years of immersion in seawater, it becomes a valuable Chinese medicine.
In this way, the probability of Bartley surviving the belly of a whale is extremely low, and the story of "The Man in the Belly of the Whale" may just be a legend.
In fact, humans are not in the whale's diet, but whales are human prey. Human whaling has existed since the Stone Age, humans hunted whales for whale meat, baleen were made into baskets, bones were made into tools, by the 18th century, whale oil was used as fuel and lubricant for lamps, whale bones and baleen were used to make corsets and skirts, and ambergris became an important ingredient in perfumes.
From 1900 to 1911, the number of human whaling increased from 2,000 to 20,000, and Japan, with its 400-year history of whaling, is the largest whaling and whaling country today. So far, the whale population has plummeted, and seven whale species have been listed as endangered, namely blue whales, sperm whales, humpback whales, fin whales, right whales, SEI whales and Northern Lights whales, and critically endangered whales include narwhals, Cook Bay beluga whales, North Atlantic right whales and Western Pacific gray whales.
Even if humans are aware of the importance of protecting whales, due to the destruction of the marine ecological environment, the living environment of whales is extremely harsh, and whale stranding incidents occur from time to time.
Human hunting activities not only have a great impact on whale populations, but even affect marine ecosystems. After the whale dies naturally, its body falls into the deep sea, forming an ecosystem dominated by decomposers, a process known as "whale fall".
In the deep sea of the North Pacific, whale falls sustain the survival of at least 12,490 organisms. Unfortunately, fewer than 50 natural whale falls have been found.
Before considering humans being devoured by whales, perhaps it is worth thinking about what humans have brought to whales? #所见所得, very scientific ## academic sharing officer ##大有学问 #
