The new movie Whale fallreleased on October 16, literally takes viewers into the belly of the beast. The survival thriller, based on the 2023 novel by Daniel Kraus, follows college student Jay Gardiner (played by Austin Abrams) as he is accidentally swallowed by a sperm whale while scuba diving. Viewers watch apprehensively as Jay navigates the whale’s multi-chambered stomach, desperately searching for a way out, all while thinking about the anniversary of his father’s death.
The production of the novel and subsequent film relied heavily on collaboration with scientific advisors. One of them — Joy Reidenberg, a comparative anatomist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York — says she and the storytellers discussed everything from which species of whale would work best for the “modern-day Jonah” story to what damage Jay might suffer while in various chambers of the stomach.
Here, Nature speaks to Reidenberg and Ilias Foskolos, who study deep-diving toothed whales at Aarhus University in Denmark and Stanford University in California, to help separate science from fiction.
Jay dives offshore in California and finds himself tangled with a giant squid and accidentally swallowed. Is this possible for a sperm whale?
Foskolos: This poses some problems. Sperm whales are generally not found in coastal areas. They are oceanic predators. They will not feed on anything that is at shallow depths. Most evidence from the stomach contents of sperm whales suggests that they consume fairly small prey. They mainly consume squid that are around 30 to 40 centimeters long, so nothing like the size of a person. Sometimes they opt for larger squid, but this is not very common.
Reidenberg: Sperm whales don’t really have a mouth to carry anything. But the throat passage is actually quite wide. And if it’s a very large sperm whale, which is the premise of this movie and the book, then it’s physically possible. Behaviorally, could this happen?
You have to understand that the premise of all this is that this sperm whale lures (Jay) accidentally (with a squid). If you were eating a gummy bear and someone put a rock next to it and you put the rock in your mouth with the gummy bear, you would probably spit it all out because that’s not really what you want to eat. So, how likely is it that a sperm whale will ingest a human? About as likely as you’ll ingest a rock.
During the film, Jay catches a glowing jellyfish that was also swallowed by the whale to light his path as he searches for an exit.Credit: 20th Century Studios/Everett Collection
Could a human survive in a whale’s stomach chambers?
Reidenberg: I think so, if they had enough adequate protection.
The first chamber is intended to be a mechanical mushing chamber. What this stomach is trying to do is break (Jay) into smaller digestible units. If you have something that hits the walls against the person, or tightens like a boa constrictor around someone’s chest, would that stop that person’s heart? Usually these muscles are trying to crush something that doesn’t have bones. Humans have bones. We are therefore now faced with a form of resistance that this whale is not used to encountering. And then add the scuba tank, which is fairly incompressible. It would be unlikely for the stomach to compress the entire chest, as there is always that area where the ribs meet the tank.
If the diver is wearing a dry suit, it is unlikely that stomach acids (in the second chamber) will enter that dry suit. Only the exposed areas are the ones that would start to burn. And you don’t necessarily die from burns, but it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience.
What does the term “whale fall” mean to scientists?
Foskolos: What we call falling whales are just the remains of a dead whale on the sea floor, which create entire ecosystems, because they can sometimes fuel different communities of animals depending on the decomposition state of the whale, which is amazing.
Reidenberg: There is nothing else growing there that can provide nutrients. There are a lot of scavengers waiting for something. And when a whale falls, it is like manna from heaven. Everything comes from miles around to feed on this carcass, and it develops its own community.
Gn entert
