A diver from Cape Cod, Massachusetts was gulped up and then spat out by a humpback whale feeding off the coast of Provincetown early Friday morning.  The diver, Michael Packard, 56, of Wellfleet, was hunting for lobsters while about 45 feet down. He told WBZ-TV, after he was released from Cape Cod hospital, how “all of a sudden I felt this huge bump, and everything went dark.”

“Then I realized, oh my God, I’m in a whale’s mouth … and he’s trying to swallow me,” he said. “And I thought to myself OK, this is it – I’m finally – I’m gonna die.” His thoughts went to his wife and children.

He estimates he was in the whale’s mouth for about 30 seconds but continued to breathe because he still had his breathing apparatus in. Then the whale surfaced, shook its head, and spat him out. He was rescued by his crewmate in the surface boat.

Remarkably, Packard suffered bruising but no broken bones or other injuries. 

Although many of the media outlets describe the event as a diver being “swallowed” by a humpback whale, that would have been physically impossible. The esophagus of humpback whales is only around four to five inches in diameter, not anywhere large enough to swallow a diver wearing scuba gear.

Humpback whales eat up to 3,000 pounds of krill and small fish per day by “lunge-feeding“. Their mouth and throat expand into a sort of balloon shape as it scoops up schools of its prey and considerable quantities of water. They then filter the krill and fish through flexible comb-like baleen plates and squeeze out the excess water. 

As surprised as the diver was to find himself in the whale’s mouth, the whale must have been equally shocked to discover that it had scooped up Michael Packard, wearing his dive gear.

Dr. Jooke Robbins, Director of Humpback Whale Studies, located at the center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, commented that “If something lies directly in the path of a lunge-feeding humpback whale, the whale might not always be able to detect it or avoid it in time. For example, some entanglements in fishing gear begin this way and can threaten the life of the whale.” 

While this sort of encounter is rare, it is not unknown. In 2019, a wildlife photographer captured the scene when a humpback whale in Monterey Bay scooped up a male sea lion in its mouth while feeding. The sea lion escaped when the whale reopened its mouth. 

Also in 2019, wildlife photographer Rainer Schimpf was in the water, filming a sardine run off the coast of South Africa, when a Bryde’s whale, another species of baleen whale, accidentally caught him in its mouth.

The whale quickly realized Schimpf was not a sardine and loosened its grip on him, which allowed Schimpf to resurface.

Schimpf recalls the incident in the video below, which includes photos of the event.

I Was Spat Out By A Whale

Thanks to Alaric Bond for contributing to this post.