![\"Movie](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/d41586-026-03358-8_53883198.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\nThe new film Whalefall, released on 16 October, takes viewers into the belly of the beast \u2014 quite literally. The survival thriller, based on Daniel Kraus\u2019s 2023 novel, follows university student Jay Gardiner (played by Austin Abrams) as he is accidentally swallowed by a sperm whale while scuba diving. Viewers watch with apprehension as Jay treks through the whale\u2019s multi-chambered stomach, looking desperately for a way out \u2014 all while reckoning with the anniversary of his father\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
The making of both the novel and its subsequent film relied heavily on collaboration with scientific advisors. One of them \u2014 Joy Reidenberg, a comparative anatomist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City \u2014 says she and the storytellers discussed everything from what whale species would work best for the \u201cmodern-day Jonah\u201d story to what damage Jay might incur while inside various stomach chambers.<\/p>\n
Here, Nature speaks to Reidenberg and Ilias Foskolos, who researches deep-diving toothed whales at both Aarhus University in Denmark and Stanford University in California, to help separate science from fiction.<\/p>\n
Jay dives offshore in California and gets mixed up with a giant squid and accidentally swallowed. Is that possible for a sperm whale?<\/p>\n
Foskolos: There are a few problems with this. Sperm whales are usually not in coastal areas. They\u2019re oceanic predators. They won\u2019t feed on something that is at shallow depths. Most evidence from sperm whale stomach contents suggests that they consume quite small prey. They consume mostly squid of about 30 to 40 centimetres long \u2014 so nothing even close to a person\u2019s size. Sometimes they go for bigger squid, but that\u2019s not very common.<\/p>\n
Reidenberg: Sperm whales don\u2019t have much of a mouth to carry anything. But the throat passageway is actually quite large. And if it\u2019s a very large sperm whale, which is the premise for this movie and for the book, then it\u2019s physically possible. Behaviourally, could this ever happen?<\/p>\n
You have to realize that the premise of the whole thing is that this sperm whale is pulling [Jay] in accidentally [with a squid]. If you were eating a gummy bear, and someone put a pebble next to it and you put the pebble in your mouth with the gummy bear, you’d probably spit everything back out again because that\u2019s not really what you want to eat. So how likely is it for a sperm whale to ingest a human? About as likely as you are to ingest a rock.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
During the film, Jay grabs a glowing jellyfish that was also swallowed by the whale to light his way as he looks for an exit.Credit: 20th Century Studios\/Everett Collection<\/p>\n
Could a human survive inside a whale\u2019s stomach chambers?<\/p>\n
Reidenberg: I think so, if they had enough of the right protection.<\/p>\n
The first chamber is supposed to be a mechanical mushing chamber. What that stomach is trying to do is break [Jay] into smaller digestible units. If you\u2019ve got something that\u2019s punching the walls against the person, or constricting like a boa constrictor might around someone\u2019s chest, would it stop that person\u2019s heart? Usually, these muscles are trying to mash up something that doesn’t have bones. Humans have bones. So now we\u2019re dealing with a form of resistance that this whale\u2019s not used to encountering. And then add the scuba tank, which is pretty incompressible. It\u2019d be pretty unlikely that the stomach would constrict all of the chest, because you still have that area where the ribs meet the tank.<\/p>\n
If the scuba diver has a dry suit on, then stomach acids [in the second chamber] are unlikely to get into that dry suit. Only the areas that are exposed are the areas that would start to burn. And you don\u2019t necessarily die from burns, but that would not be a pleasant experience.<\/p>\n
What does the term \u2018whale fall\u2019 mean to scientists?<\/p>\n
Foskolos: What we call whale fall is just the remains of a dead whale along the sea bottom, which creates entire ecosystems, because they can at times fuel different communities of animals depending on the state of decomposition of the whale, which is amazing.<\/p>\n
Reidenberg: There isn\u2019t anything else really growing down there that can provide nutrients. There are lots of scavengers around waiting for something. And when a whale fall comes down, it’s like manna from heaven. Everything comes from miles around to feed on this carcass, and it develops its own community.<\/p>\n
Watch this video to learn about the discovery of an ancient whale necropolis on the floor of the Indian Ocean. It’s the deepest whale fall community ever found.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new film Whalefall, released on 16 October, takes viewers into the belly of the beast \u2014 quite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652792,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[390,1503,146,4068,85,46,4069,5564,141],"class_list":["post-652791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-animal-behaviour","tag-culture","tag-entertainment","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-ocean-sciences","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652791\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}