An American diver is completely stuck in the mouth of a humpback whale, a species whose characteristics prevent it from swallowing a human. It was the luck of Michael Packard, who had already recovered from his fear.
It wasn’t 8am on Friday, and 56-year-old diver Michael Packard was already in the water for his second dive of the day. The vessel he was following off the beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts (USA) was surrounded by a fleet of boats fishing for perch. The water temperature was 15 degrees Celsius and the visibility was about six meters at depth. A typical day for Michael, who, as an experienced diving licensed lobster, has been accustomed to hauling clams from the sandy bottom of the sea for years. But even that didn’t prepare him for what happened.
About ten feet from the bottom, Packard knew what it meant to be part of the ocean’s food chain: his entire body had been swallowed by a humpback whale (also known as a humpback whale, humpback whale, or black whale). “All of a sudden I felt a strong jolt and then everything went dark,” Packard said Friday afternoon after he was discharged from the hospital he was admitted to.
At first he was afraid that he was inside a white shark, but did not feel the teeth and did not notice any obvious wounds, so he quickly realized that he was swallowed by a whale. “I was all there, everything was black. I thought there was no way out, “I’m done, I’m dead.” I could only think about my boys, who are 12 and 15 years old. “
Equipped with diving equipment, the American soon began to struggle with the body of a whale inside the animal, which eventually crawled out after 30-40 seconds. “I saw a light and the whale started shaking its head from side to side. And then I realized that he was already on the surface, ”he said. After that, the whale eventually released the diver back into the sea, after which he was rescued by a crew member who was on Michael’s ship and headed towards the coast, calling for help. “Thank God it wasn’t a white shark. He continues to see them. He must have thought it was over, ”Michael’s sister Cynthia Packard told the local Cape Cod Times.
The whale’s “mistake”
“Based on what has been described, what happened was nothing more than an ‘accidental error’ on the part of the animal,” said Jook Robbins, a humpback whale expert at the Provincetown Coastal Research Center. Humpbacks, the researcher explained, are not aggressive animals, especially towards humans. Given the average size of the whale, Robbins suspects that it was a young mammal looking for sandilis (a long-bodied fish native to the Atlantic). It turns out that when the humpback whale opens its mouth to eat, it sticks out like a parachute, blocking the frontal view, so in many individuals mouths and jaws fall into fishing gear.
Nevertheless, the expert assured that such incidents are extremely rare. Although they can put a large object in their mouth, as it happened, the esophagus of toothless whales is too small to swallow a human, so they end up spitting it out. And unlike whales with teeth like killer whales, they don’t even hurt their mouths, but rather use their tail.
