{"id":930720,"date":"2026-10-16T21:48:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-16T21:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/930720\/"},"modified":"2026-10-16T21:48:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-16T21:48:13","slug":"could-a-whale-swallow-a-human-whalefall-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/930720\/","title":{"rendered":"Could a whale swallow a human, ‘Whalefall’ style?"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

In the new film \u201cWhalefall,\u201d<\/a> a scuba diver has a very bad day. On what should be a routine dive off the California coast, Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) gets caught up in a battle between a giant squid and sperm whale. The sperm whale wins, swallowing the squid; but poor Jay goes down the gullet, too.<\/p>\n

Could this actually happen? Science Friday consulted Shane Gero, sperm whale researcher and biology lead for Project CETI<\/a>, and \u201cWhalefall\u201d director Brian Duffield, to get the facts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sperm whale vs. giant squid<\/p>\n

The inciting incident of the film is a fight between a giant squid and a sperm whale. Gero says this battle takes place in the ocean every day, but there\u2019s no documentation of it. We only know sperm whales dine on giant squid because of evidence left behind: The whales often have scarring<\/a> around their mouths that aligns with giant squid tentacles and barbs. And giant squid have been found in sperm whale stomach contents and feces.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Duffield says it was a unique challenge to portray a common but never-before-seen occurrence with scientific accuracy. \u201cThere\u2019s almost no footage of giant squid alive, and definitely no footage of [sperm whales] really engaged in a hunt,\u201d Duffield says. \u201cWhile we were shooting there was one video that popped up of a dead squid in a sperm whale\u2019s mouth, but that\u2019s the extent of the footage we have.\u201d<\/p>\n

Could a whale eat a human?<\/p>\n

To be clear, there\u2019s no documented evidence that a sperm whale has ever swallowed a human. But it\u2019s not an impossibility, according to Gero. A large sperm whale\u2019s esophagus can be 30-40 centimeters in diameter. \u201cThat\u2019s like fitting through a tennis racket, maybe a little bigger than that,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s not gonna happen without you noticing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sperm whales have the largest esophaguses of any whale. While most whales eat a slurry of krill and fish, sperm whales prefer giant squid, which are much meatier. \u201cGiant squid are huge, they can be 30 to 60 feet long,\u201d Gero says. \u201cIf anyone\u2019s had calamari recently, this is a tough body that they\u2019re swallowing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AAustin Abrams as Jay Gardiner in \u201cWhalefall.\u201d Credit: \u00a9 2026 20th Century Studios<\/p>\n

Sperm whale stomachs have four separate chambers, each in charge of a different part of the digestive process. In \u201cWhalefall,\u201d we see two of them: The first stomach squeezes and crushes food (and our main character). The second stomach is filled with acid that breaks down food chemically.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The \u201cWhalefall\u201d team made practical sets of these two stomachs, complete with squeezing walls and faux stomach goo. They also created the whale\u2019s esophagus, and a true-to-scale sperm whale head.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u200a\u201dWhat was so fun about this movie was that the more scientifically accurate we went, \u200ait just made everything worse for Austin Abrams\u2019 character,\u201d Duffield says. \u201cThe whale is designed to digest food in a fascinating way, and poor Austin is a food source. Every time a note would come back, we\u2019d go, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s so much worse for him,\u2019 and implement it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Could you escape a whale\u2019s stomach?
\n\"A\u201cWhalefall\u201d director Brian Duffield (left) with Austin Abrams (right) who plays Jay Gardiner. Credit: Jennifer Clasen \u00a9 2026 20th Century Studios.<\/p>\n

Gero says the chances of a person finding themself in a \u201cWhalefall\u201d situation are slim to none. And that\u2019s a good thing, because the odds for survival would not be good. Sperm whale stomachs have evolved specifically to kill and digest things, not to keep them alive. These whales dive more than 3,000 feet deep, where the pressure alone would be enough to kill a person. And the stomachs would be filled with things the whale can\u2019t digest, like hundreds of piercing giant squid beaks the size of a human fist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think you would have very much time to consider how you\u2019re gonna get out,\u201d Gero says. But, in a pinch, some human ingenuity could provide an answer.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u200aI think there are lots of resources that, that you might find in the belly of a whale, both that should be there and unfortunately that shouldn\u2019t, that you could use to sort of MacGyver your way out, should you ever find yourself in this impossible predicament.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Kathleen Davis, SciFri Producer<\/p>\n

This is an article from our newsletter \u201cScience Goes To The Movies.\u201d<\/a> To get a story about the science of popular movies and TV in your inbox every month, subscribe here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the new film \u201cWhalefall,\u201d a scuba diver has a very bad day. On what should be a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":930721,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[64,63,128,338],"class_list":["post-930720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=930720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/930721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=930720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=930720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=930720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}