Humpback Whale Gobbling Up and Spitting Out a Kayaker

**kellyhound** · #1 ● 02-15-2025, 10:10 AM

A video appears to show a humpback whale gobbling up a kayaker off the coast of South America before quickly 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 water and seemed to close its mouth around Simancas and his kayak.

For a few seconds, the whale and Simancas disappeared beneath the waves.

"I thought I was dead," Simancas told. "I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me."

The whale didn't hold onto Simancas for long as he soon popped back up at the surface. Then, as the terrified kayaker treaded water, the whale hunched its spine and dove back down into the ocean.

Simancas' father, Dell, caught the whole incident on video before assisting his son out of the water. The pair returned to shore unharmed.

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) feed on small fish and crustaceans. To eat enough to sustain their massive size, the whales take stretchy mouthfuls of more than 5,000 gallons (23,000 liters) of seawater and filter out their prey across baleen plates — kind of like long hairy teeth that filter rather than bite. This strategy evolved for hunting small animals, not humans in kayaks.

Erich Hoyt, a research fellow at Whale and Dolphin Conservation in the U.K. and author of the Encyclopedia of Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises (Firefly Books, 2023), told that the whale in the video almost certainly snapped up the kayaker by accident.