Despite their large size, blue whales do not eat people. They couldn’t eat a person no matter how hard they tried to.
Even though these marine mammals are the largest animals globally, several factors prevent them from eating a person.
First, blue whales are baleen whales, so they are born with baleen plates instead of teeth.
The baleen plates have thin hairs or bristles attached to them, which resemble the teeth found on a comb.
The baleen bristles’ purpose is to keep small food such as fish, krill, and various crustaceans from escaping (the same way the bars on a prison cell keep people from escaping jail) while allowing water to pass through.
Second, most baleen whales consume small prey due to their lack of teeth, which would be needed to tear apart most mammals’ flesh to make digestion easier.
Without teeth, they cannot tear apart their prey, so it would likely be impossible for these baleen whales to eat a human.
Third, a blue whale’s throat is narrow and usually measures less than one ft. wide!
Even if they tried to swallow a human whole, they wouldn’t be able to fit a person down their throat.
Blue whales won’t even attempt to eat small marine mammals, let alone humans.
There are no known recorded events of a blue whale ever eating or consuming a person partially or wholly except in stories and mythology.
Blue whales’ primary diet consists almost solely of krill (occasionally fish), a small aquatic shrimp-like invertebrate that typically measures 1 -2 centimeters long.
However, some may grow to be nearly 6 inches in size.
Blue whales can consume as many as 40 million krill per day.
However, they are limited by how much they can swallow at any given time due to their narrow throat.
Some people believe that the only whale with a throat big enough to attempt to swallow a human is a sperm whale.
However, since sperm whales often dive to profound levels when hunting for food (3,000 ft. or more), it is doubtful that a sperm whale would ever swallow a person.
The average human isn’t likely to dive more than 15 – 30 ft. underwater without special diving equipment.
Only a handful of records have recorded divers reaching depths of over 1,000 ft. with high-end expensive diving equipment designed to deal with deep-sea diving pressure.
Since most people can only hold their breath for 30 – 90 seconds, and the atmospheric pressure of water can significantly reduce that amount of time a person can hold their breath, it is unlikely that people will reach the depths required to be eaten or consumed by most whale species that hunt for prey at deeper levels of the ocean.
What about the blue whale’s mouth?
The throats of baleen whales (such as the blue and humpback whales) are too small to swallow a person.
Nevertheless, there is a chance that a person could end up caught in a giant whale’s mouth.
Several recent occurrences have been observed with large baleen whales breaking the surface of the water and nearly “swallowing a person.”
So what would happen if you ended up in the mouth of a giant whale? We aren’t 100 percent sure.
We know that their throat is too small to swallow a human, but it may be possible that you would end up crushed or seriously injured from the pressure of their mouth and baleen plates as they close their mouth shut.
If you manage to survive, you may be taken deep below the water’s surface, where you could suffocate and drown.
There is also a chance that the whale may try to push you out of its mouth by opening its mouth up and using its tongue to force you out.
Fortunately, we cannot point to any particular instances of this happening.
Still, with technology improving, we are finding occasional reports and videos of near encounters with these amazingly giant animals.
What if you could be swallowed up
If you look around long enough, you’ll likely run into stories of whales swallowing people for several hours or days and coming out alive dehydrated, or in hysteria but alive.
However, if we assume a whale could swallow a human, it’s likely the individual wouldn’t survive for more than a few minutes, let alone several days.
The inability to breathe, compression, and physical pressure placed on the body alone are enough to make for a very short existence.
Even if we assume that a person could breathe comfortably inside a whale’s stomach while it was underwater, the absence of food and clean drinking water would eventually take its toll.
Humans cannot take in large quantities of saltwater as they would suffer from dehydration, kidney and organ failure, muscle cramping, high blood pressure, and other life-threatening ailments.
Consuming oceanic saltwater will lead to a net loss in hydration as the large quantities of salt dehydrate you more than the water can hydrate the body.
If you combine oxygen deprivation, physical compression from the whale’s body, and a lack of food/cleaning drinking water, you quickly realize the seriousness of being swallowed by a whale and the very high likelihood of not surviving such an event.
As stated earlier, one of the only whales capable of swallowing a human is the massive sperm whale.
Their deep-diving nature and offshore lifestyle make it extremely unlikely they would swallow a human.
Stomach content observations
Over the decade, researchers and biologists have performed several observations/autopsy’s on the stomach contents of beached marine mammals such as whales.
Most cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) have been found to consume small fish, krill, crustaceans, cephalopods, and other small prey.
However, a few species of cetacea have shown some interesting findings.
For example, the killer whale has been found with some rare but interesting types of prey in its stomach.
The most exciting things in a killer whale’s stomach include polar bears, reptiles, marine birds, and moose.
The sperm whale has also been observed consuming fascinating prey, and at least one observation claims that a fully intact shark was found in the stomach of this large marine mammal.
As sperm whales can swallow 40 ft. long squid whole and are believed to hunt megamouth sharks occasionally, they may also be able to consume an entire shark for dinner.
After all, despite being a toothed whale, the sperm whale has been found successfully hunting large prey, even when all of its teeth are missing.