A lobster diver from Provincetown, Massachusetts became a modern-day Jonas as he found himself inside the mouth of a humpback whale - before being spit shortly after.
Michael Packard was diving for lobsters off the coast of Provincetown on a clear Friday morning. He was closely tailed by his longtime fishing partner, Josiah Mayo, in the fishing vessel "The J&J" through the bubbles rising from his underwater gear.
In the report from New York Times, the duo already has a hundred pounds of lobster hauled, with Packard looking for more - at 40 feet underwater. The bubbles then suddenly stopped and the water moved, revealing a gigantic creature later known to be a humpback whale.
"I immediately thought it was the shark encounter that we'd unfortunately been preparing for for years," Mayo told The New York Times in an interview. Shortly after, Mayo saw Packard emerge from the water, spat by the humpback whale. Packard suffered soft tissue damage to his legs as well as a dislocated knee from the modern-day Jonas and the whale encounter.
ILULISSAT, GREENLAND - AUGUST 04: A humpback whale swims in the Ilulissat Icefjord on August 04, 2019, in Ilulissat, Greenland. A similar whale swallowed a lobster diver in Massachusetts Friday, June 11.
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Men and Whales in the Open Seas
Charles Mayo, Josiah's father and a senior scientist from the local Center for Coastal Studies, also told The Times that encounters such as those that befell Packard are "virtually unheard-of." Another expert agrees with the older Mayo's assessment. Peter Corkeron, lead of the New England Aquarium whale research team, said in an NBC Boston interview that the poor visibility in the water might've played a part in this modern-day Jonas story. He explains that the waters off Cape Cod are murky. Pair this with feeding whales moving really fast and you get an accident like the incident with Packard.
While whales eating humans are rare, these are not impossible - and there have been documented cases of people ending up in whale mouths for one reason or another. In 2019, wildlife photographer Rainer Schimpf was taking photos of a sardine run off the Port Elizabeth coast in South Africa when a Bryde's whale scooped him into its mouth, together with a bunch of sardines. The then 51-year-old diver and the photographer had his own modern-day Jonas story when the upper half of his body was swallowed by the whale. Though he was trapped for just about two seconds, a photograph of his lower half jutting out of the whale's mouth has been likened to the Bible story of a man eaten by a whale.
Do Whales Eat People?
As Corkeron explains, it was very likely that the humpback whale swallowing Packard was an accident. Unlike sharks, who are natural predators that seek out prey and even attack humans on occasion, whales are more gentle creatures despite their size. These "gentle giants" consume smaller marine animals like krills, fishes, squids, and planktons. For example, SeaWorld explains that right whales have fine baleen, which separates small animals from the seawater when they open their mouths to feed.
Additionally, humpback whales like the one that swallowed Packard, or the Bryde's whale that scooped up Schimpf, prey mostly on krills and schools of fishes and groups of small crustaceans, like lobsters.
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