Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
Speaker 1: you know, let's let's listen to a second for this music.
Speaker 1: That's it's playing here Staring Black and the Boar Thruthy
Speaker 1: Angry Jaws Giants. That is, of course the Mariners Revenge
Speaker 1: song by the Decembrist, just a little bit from that track,
Speaker 1: and that's off the album Picturesque. I highly recommend uh
Speaker 1: everyone go download the full song, the full album or
Speaker 1: whatever after the podcast. But it's great because it deals
Speaker 1: with the idea of being eaten alive, not only eating alive,
Speaker 1: but swallowed alive whole by an enormous whale, which I think,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day is sort of a
Speaker 1: primal fear that we have. And the reason I think
Speaker 1: that is because there are so much literature, children's literature
Speaker 1: that is concerned with this idea. And if you are
Speaker 1: a small child, you are also concerned with it, right
Speaker 1: because you know that to some extent you are defenseless.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, and certainly a small child is a more
Speaker 1: corrective snack to various creatures they would otherwise hesitate to
Speaker 1: praying a human. Certainly, anyone, anyone who lives in Florida
Speaker 1: knows that the rules concerning alligators that they are more
Speaker 1: likely to eat children whole as well as dogs and whatnot,
Speaker 1: then they are gonna eat the whole human whole. It's
Speaker 1: just a more attractive snack. Uh. And and again we
Speaker 1: we get back to the primordial mindset of humans that
Speaker 1: were not quite at the top of the food chain.
Speaker 1: There was the possibility things going to eat them. Now
Speaker 1: beaten whole, Well, that's a totally different scenario. And we'll
Speaker 1: discusses is this podcast rolls on. But but yeah, I
Speaker 1: could see, you know, definitely where that is. It's a
Speaker 1: very primal fear. It is a primal fear. You see
Speaker 1: it in Hansel and Gretel, you'll see it in Little
Speaker 1: Red Riding Hood. Um. Last year there were five hundred
Speaker 1: German fairy tales that were unearthed from the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: and um they are very dark, grim like. Actually in
Speaker 1: the same period that Grim wrote The Grim Brothers and
Speaker 1: when the stories that I think was really interesting U
Speaker 1: featured a tale of a maiden who escapes a witch
Speaker 1: by transforming herself into a pond. But then the witch
Speaker 1: kind of just slurps her up and the girl has
Speaker 1: to use a knife to cut her way out of
Speaker 1: the witch. So it's a survival story. And that's what
Speaker 1: I think is at the really the basis of this
Speaker 1: swallowed whole idea that death may be imminent, but maybe,
Speaker 1: just maybe you could escape it if you were whole.
Speaker 1: It's interesting. Uh, And and certainly it's it's again. It's
Speaker 1: a trope that comes back again and again in our
Speaker 1: myths and our fictions. Obviously, there's a story of Jonah
Speaker 1: who's ordered by God to go to the city of Ninevah.
Speaker 1: But Jonah, he was He's a free thinker and then
Speaker 1: a bit of a coward, so he decided to go
Speaker 1: a different direction and not do what God told him.
Speaker 1: So God sent a storm to destroy his boat, and
Speaker 1: just to make sure that that the deed got done,
Speaker 1: also sent a whale or a giant fish, depending on
Speaker 1: your you're reading, to swallow him whole. And then of
Speaker 1: course he lives inside the whale for a little bit,
Speaker 1: thinks long and hard about what he's done, and eventually
Speaker 1: the whale frees him. Uh. And then in fiction, we've
Speaker 1: seen various characters that either either wind up in the
Speaker 1: in the belly of a whale, or alive miraculously in
Speaker 1: the belly of another terrestrial creature or in an alien creature.
Speaker 1: You see, like, there's Baron von Munchausen, there's myth the Lean,
Speaker 1: There's Pinocchio, There's Little Red Riding Hood, There's Isaac Clark,
Speaker 1: There's Boba Fette, there's hand Solo, there's John Voight in
Speaker 1: the belly of the Konda. Uh. So many, so many
Speaker 1: great family moments of various characters either almost becoming digested
Speaker 1: or or being partially digested, or just kind of magically
Speaker 1: held in the stomach of a creature and then eventually escaping.
Speaker 1: Generally they escape either through the way that they came
Speaker 1: in or out the stomach well. And then there's the
Speaker 1: flip side, us as predators, right, we have a bit
Speaker 1: of an obsession with that, or we have in our
Speaker 1: our past cultural histories. And you had mentioned in the
Speaker 1: last podcast um Sideshow Carney's ingesting frog's hole as a trick,
Speaker 1: right to to show to freak out really the audience,
Speaker 1: and then that frog surviving because they can breathe through
Speaker 1: its skin, so it's got some oxygen along with that
Speaker 1: glass of water in the in the sideshow Carney's body,
Speaker 1: and it can then regurgitate it. Yes, all right, So
Speaker 1: that's just something that I think really arrests our imagination.
Speaker 1: But turns out that something called stomach frogs and boosom
Speaker 1: snakes and slugs and slugs were a thing back in
Speaker 1: the day, along the late eighteenth century. If you had
Speaker 1: a stray gastric symptom, like you know, flatulence or um,
Speaker 1: I must have stomach snakes lactose intolerance. Before you could
Speaker 1: even identify lactose intolerance, right, you would begin to suspect
Speaker 1: that you were harboring some sort of creature whole in
Speaker 1: your digestive system. And people began to have these ideas like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I was walking home and there's this pond,
Speaker 1: and I was thirsty, and I took a drink from it.
Speaker 1: Surely I swallowed a frog unbannach to me, or maybe
Speaker 1: some frog eggs or some snail eggs or something, and
Speaker 1: then it ends up hatching in you and then they're
Speaker 1: causing turmoil. And then in some cases there were reports
Speaker 1: where people claimed to have um pooped out live creatures
Speaker 1: and in some cases they would actually have them um
Speaker 1: like in jars and whatnot. And it was it was
Speaker 1: quite a big, big idea and in the time to
Speaker 1: the ex it was creeping into actual medical medical literature
Speaker 1: at the time. Um I did a blog post about
Speaker 1: this and about one of the positions New York position
Speaker 1: who who actually experimented this by feeding force feeding some
Speaker 1: live slugs to a dog and then uh peeking inside
Speaker 1: and having a little rummage around via surgery to find
Speaker 1: out if this if the slugs were intact, and of
Speaker 1: course the slugs were being broken right, like the surgeon
Speaker 1: actually made a fistula in the dog's stomach to take
Speaker 1: appear into the stomach ak a whole stomach. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: because the whole is a is a great way to
Speaker 1: find out what's going on inside of something, be at
Speaker 1: a house or a dog's stomach, or a cow's stomach
Speaker 1: or a human stomach. I mean, that's one of the
Speaker 1: ways we learned about what's going on in there. But
Speaker 1: but in reality, of course, these individuals were not um
Speaker 1: having slugs grow the maturity inside their their guts and
Speaker 1: then crawling out their poop. Shoot, No, they were They were,
Speaker 1: you know, probably they came home from the lake or whatnot,
Speaker 1: and they had maybe there was a slug or a
Speaker 1: lizard attached to their swimsuit or their clothing. They found
Speaker 1: it in the vicinity of their bathroom or their their garments.
Speaker 1: They put one and two together with this strange stomach
Speaker 1: ache they had. And and then if we've talked about
Speaker 1: with any kind of like paranormal experience, if the story
Speaker 1: is out there, if the storyline is established, it's easier
Speaker 1: to fall into it. So the first person in the
Speaker 1: world to think, oh, my goodness, I bet I swallowed
Speaker 1: some slug eggs and I just pooped them all over
Speaker 1: the place, that person may have been a bit of
Speaker 1: a nut But like the the the sixth person, the
Speaker 1: fiftie person, the hundred and fiftieth person to come up
Speaker 1: with that, they had the pre existing storyline to fall into,
Speaker 1: so it becomes less and less nutty. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: was just thinking how that ties into some of the
Speaker 1: pathos that we've seen with witchcraft or some of the
Speaker 1: myth making that that comes out of that. So, yes,
Speaker 1: I fell asleep and an evil snake crawled into or
Speaker 1: slithered its way into my esophagus into my bowels. That's
Speaker 1: an example. I didn't really think that. Um. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: back to the idea of being swallowed whole um. It
Speaker 1: Also it also gets into this this idea of of
Speaker 1: almost a desire and a comfort, which I think is
Speaker 1: interesting too, because on one hand, primal fear, nobody really
Speaker 1: wants to be eaten alive. Nobody really certainly wants to
Speaker 1: be eaten whole and partially died, part possibly digested. Um.
Speaker 1: But you do have apparently this thing called voraphilia, which
Speaker 1: I was not aware of until I guess it was
Speaker 1: vaguely aware of it to via like the German cannibal trial,
Speaker 1: where we get one individual who was seeking looking for
Speaker 1: that special someone who might want to be eaten, might
Speaker 1: want to be eaten and would have this desire to
Speaker 1: be eaten. But then there's a whole side of it
Speaker 1: that I discovered when I was researching the the winged
Speaker 1: devour creatures from BeastMasters, the ones that wrapped their caps
Speaker 1: from people and melt them down, really cool monsters. Um.
Speaker 1: Check out the blog post on that if you want.
Speaker 1: But but I ended up finding that there there's like
Speaker 1: a whole section of the Internet devoted to fantasies about them,
Speaker 1: about people sometimes been sell being eaten generally whole by
Speaker 1: some sort of monster or a monstrous person. And it's
Speaker 1: it's very it's very strange. Um. But but so I'm
Speaker 1: trying to wrap my head around it, like, like what
Speaker 1: is it about that? And uh, And it never really
Speaker 1: made sense until I was reading this article that they
Speaker 1: We're going to get into a little more uh. Later
Speaker 1: in the podcast by Ben Shattuck for Salon dot Com
Speaker 1: titled Swallowed by a Whale A True Tale question Mark,
Speaker 1: where he says that he he says this regarding being
Speaker 1: swallowed by whale, says, still, you'd like to think it's possible,
Speaker 1: you want to believe in an animal that can fit
Speaker 1: you inside them, that you might be consumed, not piece
Speaker 1: by piece, mouthful by mouthful, as sharks and bears would
Speaker 1: eat you, but wholly, to be encased as your full
Speaker 1: self womb like, so returning to the womb. And it's
Speaker 1: kind of a return to the womb. It's kind of like,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like the idea of being eaten alive,
Speaker 1: eaten whole by a monster. He's kind of like a
Speaker 1: big hug. Now that's one of the types of for
Speaker 1: I feel you, that's the kind of the kinder, softer
Speaker 1: side of it. There are other types that aren't quite
Speaker 1: as Yeah, it's there's a whole l it's the Internet,
Speaker 1: so there's a whole dark corridor to vanish down if
Speaker 1: you so choose. But now that's that's not the reason
Speaker 1: why we wanted to take you here. We wanted to
Speaker 1: take you here because we do think that at the
Speaker 1: core of this idea is this interest in like, what
Speaker 1: about being swallowed whole? What about escaping death? What about
Speaker 1: returning to lum in a sense as well? And what
Speaker 1: extent is it possible? To what extent has it actually happened? Uh,
Speaker 1: it's fascinating, um, fascinating area of discussion. And of course
Speaker 1: we have to turn to animals that actually swallow their
Speaker 1: prey alive and in many times whole to actually get
Speaker 1: a beat on this subject. And that's the thing because obviously,
Speaker 1: when when you or I eat things, we tend to chew.
Speaker 1: We tend to We've just done an entire podcast about
Speaker 1: about smelling our food, tasting our food, and then chewing
Speaker 1: it up and transforming the food into uh, into a
Speaker 1: parcel that can be then sent through the rest of
Speaker 1: the justice system. So there are various creatures that don't
Speaker 1: do as much chewing. There are creatures that don't do
Speaker 1: you know, any chewing for the most part. But cows
Speaker 1: on the opposite spectrum, by the way, choose something like
Speaker 1: sixty shoes a day and have like three stomachs. Well,
Speaker 1: they've got the room in then yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I didn't know. I didn't know research cows for this one.
Speaker 1: So if you're thinking, hollis, what is the opposite of
Speaker 1: swallowing something? Hole is a cow? Yeah it's steady, yeah,
Speaker 1: steady digesting and chewing and process that goes on there.
Speaker 1: But you look at some of these other creatures like
Speaker 1: snakes off and consume prey whole. Though, don't get your
Speaker 1: hopes too high, because pythons, for instance, killed before eating.
Speaker 1: There is an advantage to be had in killing something
Speaker 1: before you swallow it um and if nothing else, is
Speaker 1: just easier to the creature. Take like for instans, owls. Owls,
Speaker 1: you know they'll eat their prey whole, but they have
Speaker 1: these powerful beaks and uh, it's I'm quite a challenge
Speaker 1: to get past that powerful killing beak to make it
Speaker 1: down into the rest of the owl hole. Um Likewise,
Speaker 1: crocodiles may swell pray hole, but then they'll also chop
Speaker 1: them up pretty good. I was looking at some rather
Speaker 1: horrifying photos of of supposedly, Again you never know what
Speaker 1: the Internet, and certainly when you start looking into accounts
Speaker 1: of people being eaten by animals and being eaten whole,
Speaker 1: there's a whole world of hoax out there that you
Speaker 1: have to deal with. But I saw some some photographs
Speaker 1: supposedly of crocodile's stomach, a nile crocodile which do eat
Speaker 1: humans on a fairly regular basis, and they've cut it open,
Speaker 1: and there were some pieces of of what appeared to
Speaker 1: be human there, and it was not at one piece.
Speaker 1: Sharks obviously, as Mary Road points out in her book Gulp,
Speaker 1: they can and do eat like three turtles at once,
Speaker 1: it's possible. But they're also pretty famous for their smiles,
Speaker 1: and they're not above In fact, they seem to relish
Speaker 1: chewing up their food to some extent before it goes
Speaker 1: down the whole. But then there is the the big one,
Speaker 1: the one that of course has mentioned in the December
Speaker 1: song at the start of this podcast, and the one
Speaker 1: that we're gonna spend the most time with, and that
Speaker 1: is the idea of the whale. This is, after all,
Speaker 1: this is the creature that supposedly swallowed both Noah and Pinocchio.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of a big deal, especially when you
Speaker 1: consider the kind of food that are found in well
Speaker 1: whales bellies. I mean it's it's basically like a fish
Speaker 1: market in a belly when you cut these guys open. Yeah, specifically,
Speaker 1: um of the sperm whale is the big one here,
Speaker 1: because the sperm whale is eating fairly large prey. We're
Speaker 1: talking man size squid, we're talking sharks, we're talking bucket
Speaker 1: loads of fish, coconuts, what have you showing up in
Speaker 1: their stomach. And certainly the sperm whale exists on a
Speaker 1: scale that dwarfs human. We're talking like a male sperm
Speaker 1: whale may weigh up to forty five tons that's and
Speaker 1: it maybe fifty two ft or sixteen meters long. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just a scale of a living creature that dwarfs
Speaker 1: us so enormously. Like the idea of being consumed by
Speaker 1: a whole is even more powerful, well, you know, especially
Speaker 1: when you when you consider like, you know, sixteen of
Speaker 1: us could just hang out in the mouth, you know,
Speaker 1: side by side, waving at each other. Um. And also
Speaker 1: if you consider that in nineteen fifty five, a four
Speaker 1: hundred and five pounds squid measuring six six six ft
Speaker 1: six inches minus the tentacles was recovered intact from a
Speaker 1: sperm whale. Yes, because look at that and you say, wow,
Speaker 1: like this, couldn't you just have a human in there? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because here's the thing with the with the with the
Speaker 1: sperm whale, as in evidence by the by that large
Speaker 1: squid whole in its stomach. They feed by suction a
Speaker 1: lot of the times there're sucking the food down. Now,
Speaker 1: they do have some jaws as well. We're talking to
Speaker 1: twenty six banana shaped teeth on the lower jaw to
Speaker 1: fit into sockets in the upper jaw and uh. And
Speaker 1: these things are used to choose some stuff up. They
Speaker 1: don't always always chew them up. And you have to
Speaker 1: consider too that the squid is a Bonleus creature, right,
Speaker 1: So that's what you see to swallow. The only thing
Speaker 1: be in the beak, which we'll get to, which is
Speaker 1: really interesting. Um. So yeah, let's get into this territory
Speaker 1: of what if what could you be swallowed by a whale?
Speaker 1: What would the conditions have to be in order for
Speaker 1: you to survive? Is it a myth? Or is it possible? Yes?
Speaker 1: Then this is this is uh. This topic has been
Speaker 1: explored both by Mary Roach and her book Goal, but
Speaker 1: also in this excellent Salon article by Ben Shattuck Swallowed
Speaker 1: by a whale a true tale question mark. And so
Speaker 1: there have been a lot of stories over the years
Speaker 1: about people being swallowed by a whale, particularly out of
Speaker 1: the period in um in particularly American history, where a
Speaker 1: whaling was big medicine. Because this is where and even
Speaker 1: looking back on it, you can say, if there's a
Speaker 1: potential for this animal to swallow a human hole, this
Speaker 1: is it. Because as we mentioned, UH, the m whale
Speaker 1: is not really interested in eating um, you know, hairless
Speaker 1: apes like ourselves as they fall off of ships. It's
Speaker 1: concerned with with eating deep and eating squid, eating sharks
Speaker 1: and what have you. We're not their food. But if
Speaker 1: you put you have an environment here where humans are
Speaker 1: actively hunting down sperm whales uh and trying to kill them,
Speaker 1: and then the whale retaliated is retaliating. It is and
Speaker 1: is no, slouch is quite a deadly creature, uh, in
Speaker 1: in these encounters. So you end up with these these
Speaker 1: encounters like you see and read about in Moby Dick,
Speaker 1: like you see in a thousand different whaling m illustrations,
Speaker 1: where you have men in boats just battling the sperm
Speaker 1: whale and you see people just falling all over the place,
Speaker 1: falling into the open mouths of whales. Well, you also
Speaker 1: have whales who are breaching the water and then you know,
Speaker 1: chomping down on the whole of a ship. Okay, so
Speaker 1: this is a possibility, and this this has happened. But
Speaker 1: of course, when you get these accounts, and let's say
Speaker 1: that you have an unlucky crew member who happens to
Speaker 1: be right there at that time, I'm that person is
Speaker 1: going to fall into the mouth right or or be
Speaker 1: part of just the wreckage and uh you know, maybe
Speaker 1: maybe they escape the mouth and they tell tale of it.
Speaker 1: But being in a whale's mouth is very different than
Speaker 1: being in a whale's gut. Yes, now, one of the
Speaker 1: more amusing stories, and this is bogus, by the way,
Speaker 1: but it made the rounds pretty big for for a
Speaker 1: brief period. As the star of the east. The sub
Speaker 1: vessels bothically sailing around the Falkland islands and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: some some bad stuff happens, and someone ends up falling
Speaker 1: into a whale's mouth it's from west mouth and uh,
Speaker 1: and ends up in the stomach, and then it then escapes.
Speaker 1: The stomach is eventually sped us spat out, and it's
Speaker 1: his skin is bleached white from the stomach acids, and
Speaker 1: he's he's somewhat horrified and shaken, as you might imagine,
Speaker 1: but he lives and everyone goes gaga over the story.
Speaker 1: But then it comes out that it was just it
Speaker 1: was made up. It was a hoax perpetrated by some
Speaker 1: whitlers well. And one of the reasons why we know
Speaker 1: as a hoax is because the four stomach does not
Speaker 1: have gastric juices lulling about it, or rather, there's some
Speaker 1: question about what to what degree there would be stomach acids.
Speaker 1: So this idea that he would be ejected from it
Speaker 1: bleached is pretty erroneous. Well, on that note, let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break and when we come back, more of
Speaker 1: this adventure inside of the whale's stomach again, we're talking
Speaker 1: about the idea Canna can a sperm whale swallow a
Speaker 1: human hoole? Can I swallow a man hole? If it
Speaker 1: was gonna happen, It was gonna happen during the heyday
Speaker 1: of whaling, when you had nine battling sperm whales to
Speaker 1: the death out in the middle of the ocean. As
Speaker 1: all the art illustrates, you have people falling into their mouths,
Speaker 1: falling into the water around them with his giant jaw
Speaker 1: thrashing about. Well in in his article for Salon Ben
Speaker 1: Shattuck he actually visited the new Bedford Whaling Museum research Library,
Speaker 1: and he was looking into all these accounts of whale deaths,
Speaker 1: situations where crew members died because of a whale, and
Speaker 1: a lot of these were caused by whale on boat
Speaker 1: ash action or especially the thrashing of the of the
Speaker 1: giants flukes the tail fins as they thrash out of
Speaker 1: the water. We've all seen pictures of the of the
Speaker 1: tail of the whale coming out of the water, and
Speaker 1: it's and this is a an enormous thing. Again, these
Speaker 1: are these things away tons, These are behemoths, these are
Speaker 1: well more to the point, these are le viathans and
Speaker 1: uh and they can and do crush boats when they're
Speaker 1: in close proximity to them when they're breaching the water. Well.
Speaker 1: Of course, you have the cartoons too of people being
Speaker 1: swallowed whole and then being ejected out of the blowhole.
Speaker 1: You know, there's this idea of just being sent through
Speaker 1: the digestive system of the whale is pretty deeply entrenched
Speaker 1: in our cultural fabric. Yeah. And then some people were
Speaker 1: chomped by these by by the job and the jaws
Speaker 1: moving on. The job does have teeth, And there's some
Speaker 1: pretty gruesome accounts of this, but one particular Edmund Gardner,
Speaker 1: and I'll try to include I'll try to put a
Speaker 1: photograph of this up on the website when this episode airs,
Speaker 1: because there's a there's a fairly famous photo of him,
Speaker 1: and he's sitting there in his black and white photo.
Speaker 1: You know, he's sitting there in his chair posing, uh,
Speaker 1: and you can clearly see that one of his hands
Speaker 1: is just a stump, like a just a mangled stump
Speaker 1: with no fingers on it, and that is due to
Speaker 1: a whale light he fell in uh and uh nearly died. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And again, you know, these stories get circulated as being
Speaker 1: swallowed by the sale and what we're talking about here semantics,
Speaker 1: because if someone were to be in the mouth, yes,
Speaker 1: they could escaped from the mouth, hopefully with their lives intact,
Speaker 1: but not again be digested. And that's where you see
Speaker 1: this idea being taken for granted, like you could be
Speaker 1: swallowed by a whale. Yeah. And again it comes back
Speaker 1: to this idea that it is such a compelling story.
Speaker 1: It's such a compelling idea. I was swallowed whole, and
Speaker 1: then I was in a way that you know, I
Speaker 1: returned to the womb, and then I was born again
Speaker 1: out of the whale stomach, out of the sharks by
Speaker 1: a whale. Yeah, because we both ran across this one
Speaker 1: story as we were researching this where of course we're
Speaker 1: doing all these Google searches and and uh and you know,
Speaker 1: academic article searches for swallowed alive by and then throwing
Speaker 1: in shark and whale and muskrat or whatever we happen
Speaker 1: to be looking for. And uh. And there was a
Speaker 1: story from a couple of years back. I think, um
Speaker 1: that made the rounds, I want to say, in the
Speaker 1: Telegraph or one of the major British guardian Guardian, I
Speaker 1: think and uh in the headline was something to the
Speaker 1: effect of man partially swallowed hole by shark, which which
Speaker 1: it was. You know, they at least knew better than
Speaker 1: to say in the headline that he was swallowed hole,
Speaker 1: because the whole story was he was in he was
Speaker 1: sort of partially in a shark's mouth for a little
Speaker 1: bit being chomped on, and then he escaped. And not
Speaker 1: to discount that that's a miracco's story, Like that is
Speaker 1: the kind of thing where you that incident defines your life,
Speaker 1: um for the duration I was in a shark's mouth
Speaker 1: and I didn't die completely, um, but they had to.
Speaker 1: They felt like they had to dress it up and
Speaker 1: at least tease the possibility that he was swallowed whole. Well.
Speaker 1: And what I love about Ben Shaddock's article in Salon
Speaker 1: is that he takes on, uh, not just the research
Speaker 1: of like you know, is it's plausible, but this the
Speaker 1: imaginary realm of like what would this look like if
Speaker 1: it actually happened, If circumstances were perfect and you somehow
Speaker 1: were able to get past those those gnashing teeth right,
Speaker 1: and somehow you didn't asphyxiate, you know it, with a
Speaker 1: lack of oxygen as you traveled into the belly. What
Speaker 1: would it look like if you're in the fourth stomach,
Speaker 1: drawing on his article in Salon, drawing a little bit
Speaker 1: on Mary Roach's book Gulp, which is again is excellent
Speaker 1: and everyone should pick that up, and also drawing on
Speaker 1: a little outside research and our own imaginations, let's go
Speaker 1: through that journey. Let's let's imagine being consumed by a whale. Now,
Speaker 1: the first thing, of course, of course, is we have
Speaker 1: to think about those teeth again. We have to get
Speaker 1: past those teeth without having any of ourselves torn away,
Speaker 1: And then we have to be sucked down that esophagus,
Speaker 1: which in Shattuck's article he describes this way, says, imagine
Speaker 1: a black and mucous smothered tube, socks slipping over you
Speaker 1: suck down into the holding bag holding bag, the four
Speaker 1: stomach of the sperm whale. That's right, we're talking about
Speaker 1: seven feet long by three feet wide, shaped like a
Speaker 1: big egg. Uh. He says that there will be lots
Speaker 1: of other things in there. You would likely be joined
Speaker 1: by squid, but a coconut or shark might come to
Speaker 1: Most squid that sperm whales swallow are bioluminescent. The neon
Speaker 1: flying squid is a favorite. So no time at all,
Speaker 1: you'd be bathing in a pool of phosphorescence, a slew
Speaker 1: of green yellow light winking around you, like you were
Speaker 1: standing in a field in Maine come July when all
Speaker 1: the fireflies are sparking up. The rest would be black,
Speaker 1: very black. That's beautiful. It's beautiful, and it's uh. First
Speaker 1: of all, it brings to mind us something to marry.
Speaker 1: Roach I mentioned in her book the blanket effect. She's
Speaker 1: talking about some experiments to see whether worms can eat
Speaker 1: their way out of the belly of a sale lizard
Speaker 1: or frog or a snake that has consumed it. And
Speaker 1: they talk about the blanket effect where the animal is
Speaker 1: so it's again kind of hugged by being swallowed alive
Speaker 1: and kind of goes into a comatose state. Um so,
Speaker 1: and so I can't help but think of like the
Speaker 1: hug machine, uh and and just the feeling of the
Speaker 1: cozy feeling being wrapped up in a blanket. Um except
Speaker 1: of course, this would be a mucous covered stomach that
Speaker 1: is holding it with some serious contraction strength. Yeah, I think,
Speaker 1: but unlike the like the scene in Pinocchio, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: be this vast chamber that is more or less the
Speaker 1: size of the whale in which you could set up
Speaker 1: shop on a little you know, floating dany, have a tin,
Speaker 1: cook food and have conversations or strangle um a you know,
Speaker 1: a hated enemy to death inside the belly of the
Speaker 1: We'll get to that part in a bit. But the
Speaker 1: interesting thing about the fourth stomach is that there's there's
Speaker 1: no acid present present, or that's the predominant theory right now.
Speaker 1: So I was looking around in a number of websites
Speaker 1: that are really into the idea of Joan in the whale. Uh,
Speaker 1: really lashed onto this idea because I mean, I love
Speaker 1: the story of Joan in the Whale. It's one of
Speaker 1: the great stories to come out of Judeo Christian beliefs.
Speaker 1: But as always, there there are some people who want
Speaker 1: to have a very literal interpretation of these, uh, these
Speaker 1: iconic tales, and so they look for ways that science
Speaker 1: and religion can line up. And so we found this
Speaker 1: fabulous diagram of a sperm whale's stomach that shows although
Speaker 1: the different layers of the four stomach, the main stomach,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And then you see the icon the outline
Speaker 1: the silhouette of a little boy in prayer in the
Speaker 1: fourth stomach to show this is where Jonah wound up.
Speaker 1: This is where he hung out and prayed for prayed
Speaker 1: to God, and then God eventually it all right, You're
Speaker 1: you're all right, Jonah, you can you can go free.
Speaker 1: And then he's he spat out of the whale um,
Speaker 1: which you know, it's certainly if there's a place that
Speaker 1: you're going to remain whole inside of a sperm whale
Speaker 1: and and have a long hard you know, think about
Speaker 1: what you've done, Like that's where it's going to happen.
Speaker 1: But as Mary Roach points out, in gulp um, there's
Speaker 1: gonna be a lot of stuff competing for your attention there,
Speaker 1: and uh, it's going to be pretty greesome. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: essentially it is a large area and it does seem
Speaker 1: to be devoid of gastric juices. But you would be
Speaker 1: smashed because if you look at this diagram, you see
Speaker 1: that the little holding tank to that four stomach as
Speaker 1: a tiny little tunnel leading to the other stomach chambers.
Speaker 1: Something you're gonna go, right, if you're gonna go through
Speaker 1: that that tunnel to those other ones, you're gonna get
Speaker 1: smashed to pieces. Now, Mary Roach had said she couldn't
Speaker 1: figure out what the stomach pressure of those contractions would
Speaker 1: be in a sperm whale, but she did have information
Speaker 1: from French naturalist Renee you are, and he conducted an
Speaker 1: experiment on a small raptor, and he found that the
Speaker 1: only material that emerged from the from the gizzard uncrushed
Speaker 1: was lead tubes that could withstand five hundred pounds of pressure.
Speaker 1: So this gives you an idea of the contraction strength
Speaker 1: and a small raptor. But what about in a sperm
Speaker 1: whale just much larger and swallowing things whole and having
Speaker 1: to really use a ton of pressure to get through
Speaker 1: that tiny, tiny little tunnel to the other chambers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the the muscular walls inside that four stomach three
Speaker 1: inches thick. This is that you were. You were inside
Speaker 1: the crush zone. It is just because the whale didn't
Speaker 1: chew you with its teeth. Uh, don't don't get excited,
Speaker 1: because you're about to be chewed with the fourth stomach.
Speaker 1: The four stomach is gonna ground you up into a
Speaker 1: small enough pieces that can pass into the main stomach.
Speaker 1: You know, this would make for a great haunted house. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these little chambers of digestion, don't you think it would?
Speaker 1: It gets h you know it. It's pretty bad, pretty quick.
Speaker 1: So obviously, if you're going to pass from the four
Speaker 1: stomach to the main stomach, um, you're not going to
Speaker 1: be alive for the main stomach. Assuming you miraculously made
Speaker 1: it to the four stomach, then it's just gonna be
Speaker 1: a slurry and chunks to make it to the main
Speaker 1: So in the main stomach, this is where the acid
Speaker 1: comes into play. This is where stuff will be broken
Speaker 1: down even more into a into a dissolving mass. This
Speaker 1: is where you're gonna have more and more enzymes and
Speaker 1: more and more liquification of your former body. Yeah. This
Speaker 1: this is where Shatic, in his description of trying to
Speaker 1: survive being swallowed whole, sort of seeds to well, this
Speaker 1: is the part where you become liquid goo. In his explanation,
Speaker 1: he says that liquidated you would ooze into the intestine
Speaker 1: and eventually leave the whale as excrement, floating out of
Speaker 1: the anus and into the cold deep ocean, dissolving still
Speaker 1: further until you have become so small as debris. But
Speaker 1: you were indistinguishable from the ocean itself. You would lap
Speaker 1: against whaling ships looking for whales, which is which is
Speaker 1: really the most beautiful description of a man to whale
Speaker 1: poop transformation I've ever read. Now. Now, of course, there
Speaker 1: are things that do not digest entirely inside of a
Speaker 1: sperm whales digestion system in the same way there are
Speaker 1: things that don't that don't digest completely in our own systems,
Speaker 1: one of which is the beak of the squid. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of these giant squid gulps him down, sucks
Speaker 1: him down whole in some cases. But but that beat
Speaker 1: doesn't really go away all that easily. No, And what
Speaker 1: it does is it passes through the whales intestines wholly,
Speaker 1: other bones to write of other creatures. And along the
Speaker 1: way it's screeched the intestinal line in creating scar tissue,
Speaker 1: which is then passed in a new form called ambergeese. Yes.
Speaker 1: And this is the precious commodity that is uh that
Speaker 1: is often sought after by by perfumest Yeah, it is
Speaker 1: the precious actually, and that is the because it is
Speaker 1: about six dollars per pound to purchase and use in perfume.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that Egyptians burned it as incense.
Speaker 1: So the idea here that Shaddock puts forth is that, okay, sure,
Speaker 1: now you've passed through the digestive system and your bones
Speaker 1: are helping to create, uh, you know, one of the
Speaker 1: most beautiful smells on earth in the form of this ambergeese.
Speaker 1: And that wouldn't be too bad at least there's a
Speaker 1: silver lining right to to your your your crushing death
Speaker 1: inside the fourth stomach and then your continue digestion in
Speaker 1: the main stomach and beyond. Yeah, you've contributed to genite.
Speaker 1: That's a joke by Perkingum probably Shanel number five or
Speaker 1: something like that. Yeah, something along those lines. Um. But
Speaker 1: you know that that the ambergas also joins the cats
Speaker 1: of it, right the gland the anal glands of the
Speaker 1: cats of it, which is also you just imperfume. So
Speaker 1: there you go. Out of out of darkness comes a
Speaker 1: light always always um, all right, So I have a
Speaker 1: question for you. Would you rather be swallowed whole by
Speaker 1: you're us this? I think a vulture, a human, or
Speaker 1: a penguin. Well, um, these would have to be pretty
Speaker 1: big penguins and they would have to be Okay, imagine
Speaker 1: that you either shrink yourself down or the penguin just
Speaker 1: can miniaturize. Okay, we menatorize, and uh, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to be eaten whole by one of these creatures. Well
Speaker 1: I'm from well, from reading Mary Roach's book, I know
Speaker 1: that the penguin is supposedly the preferred method of death
Speaker 1: here bingo, because it's kind of like a chronic suspension
Speaker 1: down there. Yes, that's that's a that's a great description
Speaker 1: of it. Because penguins have to travel a long distance
Speaker 1: back to feed they're young, they essentially use their stomachs
Speaker 1: as a freezer to transport it, so they lower the
Speaker 1: temperature and their stomachs and this this geese is digestion. Well,
Speaker 1: as long as I have a way to cease my
Speaker 1: need for breath, I guess I'm good. Because that's another
Speaker 1: big thing that most of these, most of our dreams
Speaker 1: and nightmares of of whole consumption by us some sort
Speaker 1: of enormous predator forget, is that we do have to breathe,
Speaker 1: and uh, and we need our air and how are
Speaker 1: we going to get it inside the belly of a monster?
Speaker 1: We mentioned the frogs earlier, Like the old Carney trick,
Speaker 1: of you swallow a frog along with a bunch of water,
Speaker 1: and then within a very short period of time and
Speaker 1: you know, in other words, the the amount of time
Speaker 1: between you swallowing the frog and spitting them up during
Speaker 1: your carnival act. The frog is able to live inside
Speaker 1: your stomach because the frog, uh pretty durable to begin with,
Speaker 1: this cut coded and productive slime, and also breathe through
Speaker 1: its skin sort of the oxygen from the water. But
Speaker 1: but you and I we cannot do that, so we
Speaker 1: would kind of be up a creek inside the belly
Speaker 1: of just about anything, be it, uh, the chili guts
Speaker 1: of a penguin or the phosphorescent crushing beauty of the
Speaker 1: sperm whales. Four stomach It's true, it's not a feat
Speaker 1: to try. Actually, yeah, well, on that note, let's close
Speaker 1: out our discussion of sperm whales with just a little
Speaker 1: more from the Mariners Revenge song by the Simbrist off
Speaker 1: the album Pigaresque. Don't know how I survived the crew
Speaker 1: all was due to live. I must have slipped between
Speaker 1: his teeth. But oh, what providence, what divine intelligence that
Speaker 1: you should survive as well as made it is my
Speaker 1: eye great try to see your green clothes, and I
Speaker 1: will whisper the last where and I of how on
Speaker 1: that song he he does mention that he that he
Speaker 1: had to get past the teeth like that most of
Speaker 1: the sailors were crushed up or didn't make it that far,
Speaker 1: but only two of them actually wound up in the
Speaker 1: belly of the whale. You know, this is a song
Speaker 1: that I love to read the lyrics, um better than
Speaker 1: I Actually, I like to listen to the song, and
Speaker 1: the song is wonderful and actually I think you should
Speaker 1: put headphones on listen to it. Um. It's it's an
Speaker 1: epic length song. But it is such a good story.
Speaker 1: It's such a it seems like such a nautical tale
Speaker 1: brought to life by the December. Yeah, I mean, because
Speaker 1: it begins it's a story told by one man to
Speaker 1: another inside the belly of a whale, with secret identities
Speaker 1: and play and longstanding um, you know, vengeance in the works.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's got all the cliches in and it's
Speaker 1: told in such a fresh way that anyway, I love
Speaker 1: it every time I take a gainder at it or listen. Alright, well,
Speaker 1: on that note, let's uh, let's call the robot over
Speaker 1: here and just do just a quick you know, one
Speaker 1: or two listener mail. Bring no more to me, robot,
Speaker 1: just one or two. All right, here's a little bit
Speaker 1: of listener mail um coming to us from Stephanie. And
Speaker 1: this is cool because this one is about our episode
Speaker 1: about regurgitation, so it kind of ties into what we're
Speaker 1: talking about here, she says. Hi, Julian Robert, I have
Speaker 1: to say, as everyone does, I absolutely love the podcast.
Speaker 1: You guys get me through a night after night of
Speaker 1: mindless sweeping and mopping at the kennel I work at.
Speaker 1: I'm writing in response to the Regurgitation Celebration podcast. I
Speaker 1: love that you guys mentioned vultures because I have a
Speaker 1: soft spot in my heart for these amazing creatures. I
Speaker 1: did an internship and Slash volunteered at a nonprofit Raptor
Speaker 1: Rehabilitation and Education center for three years, and they had
Speaker 1: two turkey vultures that were unreleasable due to injuries. You
Speaker 1: know this of course often the case. They'll have their
Speaker 1: their wings don't work anymore. They can't really live their
Speaker 1: lives in the natural world anymore, but they can be
Speaker 1: a part of you know, they can live here peacefully,
Speaker 1: and they can be part of an educational UM, an
Speaker 1: opportunity UM. She continues, while one of them got used
Speaker 1: to me coming in cleaning every day, the other named
Speaker 1: a Dante, which I also, of course, did not every day,
Speaker 1: No matter how gently and quietly I tried to enter
Speaker 1: the enclosure, Dante's reaction was to hawk up a nice
Speaker 1: steaming pile of vomit. I must say, even after three
Speaker 1: years and a whole mess of repulsive odors, there is
Speaker 1: still nothing I've encountered quite as repulsive as vulture puke.
Speaker 1: If I were a predator and had vulture vomit land
Speaker 1: anywhere near me, I would definitely high tail it out
Speaker 1: of their A S A P. Just as you said, Robert,
Speaker 1: it really is a magnificent defense mechanism, and while most
Speaker 1: may disagree, I find them absolutely beautiful. I would fully
Speaker 1: support a podcaster or two about the amazing behaviors or
Speaker 1: adaptations in the raptor world, like the awesome vulture, though
Speaker 1: not really a bird of prey. Keep doing the fan
Speaker 1: fascinating podcast, you guys do fondest regards. Stephanie from Connecticut.
Speaker 1: I love that firsthand account of vulture vomit right there. Yeah, indeed,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a great that's a great little story there.
Speaker 1: And uh and yeah, there were a lot of fascinating
Speaker 1: raptors out there. I don't know if I've taught much recently,
Speaker 1: but I do love the Lambur Guyers. The Lambur Guyers
Speaker 1: probably my one of my favorite, haven't recently the one
Speaker 1: that drops bones from high altitudes under rocks. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: there you have it. Uh, if you have any thoughts
Speaker 1: you would like to share with us about regurgitation, about vultures,
Speaker 1: about Lambur Guyers, or more to the point, about sperm
Speaker 1: whales eating humans alive, about any other animal eating people alive,
Speaker 1: people being swallowed whole. Um, you're looking at me kind
Speaker 1: of concerned. Uh no, And I'm just gonna say, but
Speaker 1: not people eating people, right right, that's that's a totally
Speaker 1: different podcast. That would be incriminating, none of that. But
Speaker 1: certainly any stories of of monsters eating people whole. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's uh that we that we should mention in pop
Speaker 1: culture and fiction and myth etcetera. We'd love to share
Speaker 1: that with everyone. If you have thoughts on the the
Speaker 1: sperm whale journey that we have presented with you, here
Speaker 1: let us know about that as well. Where can you
Speaker 1: find us? Well, are a lot of places these days.
Speaker 1: First and foremost Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That is the mothership for everything we're doing these days.
Speaker 1: You can find a podcast there, you can find the
Speaker 1: video episodes there, you can find our blog posts, you
Speaker 1: can find pictures of us. You mean, you name it,
Speaker 1: it's there. But you can also find us on Facebook.
Speaker 1: You can find us on tumbler. We are stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind and both of those. We have a
Speaker 1: Twitter account of course, where our handle is blow the Mind.
Speaker 1: And hey, if you go to YouTube, you and you
Speaker 1: look up mind stuff show, that is where all of
Speaker 1: our videos are. That's right. Check it out, Check it out,
Speaker 1: and you can always drop us on lines at blow
Speaker 1: the Mind at discovery dot com. For more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.