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A viral picture appears to show a crookback hulk gobbling up a kayaker off the seashore of South America before speedily spitting him out again .
Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father in the Strait of Magellan in Chile last Saturday ( Feb. 8) when the whale burst out of the H2O and seemed to close its mouth around Simancas and his kayak . For a few moment , the heavyweight and Simancas disappeared beneath the waves .
A humpback whale (not the one involved in the kayak incident) breaking the surface of the water to feed in Chile.
" I retrieve I was dead , " Simancas toldThe Associated Press(AP ) . " I cerebrate it had corrode me , that it had swallowed me . "
The whale did n’t hold up onto Simancas for long as he shortly pop back up at the surface . Then , as the terrified kayaker treaded water , the whale hunched its spur and dove back down into the sea . Simancas ' father , Dell , caught the whole incident on video before assisting his son out of the water . The pair returned to shore unhurt , AP report .
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A humpback whale (not the one involved in the kayak incident) breaking the surface of the water to feed in Chile.
Do humpback whales eat people?
hunchback whales ( Megaptera novaeangliae ) feed on pocket-sized fish and crustaceans . To eat enough to suffer their massive size , the whale takestretchy mouthfulsof more than5,000 gallons(23,000 liters ) of saltwater and filter out their target across baleen plate — kind of like long hirsute teeth that trickle rather than bite . This strategy evolve for track down modest beast , not humans in kayaks .
Erich Hoyt , a enquiry fellow at Whale and Dolphin Conservation in the U.K. and author of theEncyclopedia of Whales , Dolphins , and Porpoises(Firefly Books , 2023 ) , tell Live Science that the whale in the video almost for sure snapped up the kayaker by accident .
" It ’s not cleared from the telecasting whether the kayaker was entirely in the giant ’s back talk , " Hoyt say . " He could have been part at heart but I ’m certain the heavyweight would have expelled him instantly . "
This is n’t the first prison term a whale has come out to gobble someone up accidentally . In 2020,a similar viral videoshowed a hunchback whale coming out of the water and closing its backtalk around two kayakers in California . The kayakers were float above a orotund swarm of fish when the whale came up , CBC reportedat the time . The humpback directly released the kayakers , who were unscathed in the incident .
In 2021 , a lobster diver off Massachusetts estimated that he was in ahumpback whale ’s mouth for 30 secondsbefore being spat out . Whale researchers suggested at the fourth dimension that the frogman may have also float too faithful to the whale ’s food and been accidentally gobbled up with it .
Hoyt said that humans are too large to be swallow by a humpback giant . Researchers have studied humpback whale hulk with Cassin ’s auklet seabirds ( Ptychoramphus aleuticus)in their abdomen , which were presumptively by chance swallow . However , those dame are only about 9 inches ( 23 centimeters ) long , Live Science antecedently reported .
While humpbacks do n’t eat people , they have occasionally injured human when they ’ve felt threaten . In 2020 , a humpback Chrysanthemum morifolium — likely trying to protect her calf — charged bather in Australiaand sent two to the hospital . However , the species is well known for occasionallysaving other animalsfrom predators likekiller whales(Orcinus orca ) than harming humans .
Killer whales
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Simancas was let the cat out of the bag to his father about Orcinus orca whales before long before the incident with the humpback hulk took spot ( killer whale alsolive off the coast of Chile ) . He say AP that he cerebrate the hulk might have been a killer whale at first . However , even if that were the shell , a man in the sea has picayune to fear from a killer whale .
" There are no font of a wild killer giant killing and eating a human either , " Hoyt said .
Some orcas have a habit ofattacking sauceboat in southwesterly Europe , and the species haskilled humanswhen kept in incarceration , but there ’s only one confirmed case of a wildorca burn a human . That unlucky person was a surfboarder in California in 1972 , who the orca plausibly mistook for a cachet .
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