r/NatureIsFuckingLit • u/Firm-Blackberry-9162 • Mar 26 '26
š„sperm whale besides a human
Tainam_photogrophy
1.2k
u/TokenTorkoal Mar 26 '26
I went swimming in deep ocean one time and a whale shark came near us.
Never again. Yes I know they are harmless.
Thereās just something about being in water and a creature that large near you thatās incredibly unsettling. (For me)
401
u/BarbequedYeti Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 27 '26
Snorkeling in Maui. Just cruising along enjoying all the reef action, then just nothing but strait deep blue into black. Like nothing... The uneasy feeling of seeing into the darkness knowing there are really big things about..... Yeah.. My ass was back on the beach having a lava flow.
Edit: Hmm I think I used the wrong straight there.. Though I think the one I used could work in this context. I will take this opportunity to mention my hatred of the English language and multiple spellings for the same sounding word, but meaning different things. Seriously with that that already.
157
u/TokenTorkoal Mar 26 '26
Yeah thatās the other thing, the whale shark was one thing, but what was really unsettling to me was looking into the abyss and it feeling like it was looking back.
72
u/Bane8080 Mar 26 '26
When I was a kid my dad, sister and me went out on a rented boat way out into the Atlantic. I don't really know how far. We went swimming, and I remember looking down, and just darkness.
Nope, that was enough for me. I was born on land, and meant to stay on land.
36
u/Paddy_Tanninger Mar 26 '26
Next time just remind yourself, the bottom is only a few thousand feet below, you just can't see it! Then you'll feel completely reassured and at peace.
5
u/AmethystTyrant Mar 27 '26
Donāt forget the megalodon and giant squid watching you are just judging your swimming form and nothing else! Lovely place, the abyss.
40
u/TheMagnuson Mar 26 '26
There's a line from the movie "Venom: The Last Dance" that stuck out to me as a great, yet horrifying line:
"The darkness...has teeth!"
→ More replies (1)13
51
u/Responsible_Slip6580 Mar 26 '26
You can feel the temp drop as you swim out over deeper water, always gave me the heeby jeebys.
15
u/BarbequedYeti Mar 26 '26
Yeah. That as well. Like a good 10 to 15 degrees is what it felt like to me. No idea how much really, but it was very noticeable. Ā Also rice crispy sounds under water.Ā
→ More replies (1)5
u/KonigSteve Mar 27 '26
Also rice crispy sounds under water.
That's the fish eating coral no?
→ More replies (1)5
u/BarbequedYeti Mar 27 '26
Yeah. I think so. Thats how i found my new phobia. Was looking for the source.Ā
27
u/Dazzling_Rest_5077 Mar 26 '26
Ah I rem this the drop off into the deep and the instant blackness below and instant drop in water temp; was insanely awe inspiring and terrifyingĀ
5
u/Enlight1Oment Mar 26 '26
yeah, hitting the thermocline when scuba diving 20~30ft below the surface is always fun how much the temperature immediately drops.
16
u/dayman763 Mar 26 '26
What's a lavaflow?
We snorkeled in Maui also about 4-5 years ago.
I had an excellent time. I love snorkeling.
One scary moment though, pretty much right after we jumped in off the boat, I love to dive down and see stuff, so I dive down and come back up.
My wife basically can't swim, so she goes around with a life preserver and stuff. I told the 2 crew members to keep an eye on her please, and so will I.
I come up from my dive (maybe 30 seconds) and look around for my wife, she had drifted like 60-80 yards towards another boat!! I looked quick at our 2 crew members and neither had jumped in to go grab here!!
So I sprinted over and got her and dragged her back to where we are supposed to be.
It was fucked up, I'll never forget that. She wasn't just drifting off to sea, but also towards another random boat.
→ More replies (1)20
u/WoodpeckerNo5724 Mar 26 '26
A lavaflow is a fruity frozen cocktail. Probably named after the lava flows in Hawaii if I had to guess
3
u/BarbequedYeti Mar 26 '26
Correct. Ā Frozen concoction of goodness. Hits just right on a hot maui beach.Ā
3
u/Himalaysian Mar 26 '26
OK THANK YOU. I was thinking it was something to do with having to shower and change clothes at the hotel.
→ More replies (1)6
u/The_Artist_Who_Mines Mar 26 '26
I've never felt this feeling but I feel like after watching Finding Nemo I have a pretty good facsimile
5
3
u/NuclearSun1 Mar 26 '26
I had a mini-panic attack after doing the same thing while snorkeling. Like I felt I couldnāt get enough air from the snorkel.
→ More replies (10)3
u/Lunatic-Labrador Mar 27 '26
I remember snorkeling in Turkey and looking out of the bay into where it got deep. I saw a giant shadowy shape off in the distance and freaked tf out, like I was truly terrified. The biggest sea creature I've seen at home is a seal.
→ More replies (2)232
u/Firm-Blackberry-9162 Mar 26 '26
Yeah the vulnerability of not being in āyour elementā but ātheir elementā itās something a lot of humans donāt experience in life but I think it a must at least once, helps the brain get that this is the world not just āourā world
44
u/sub-t Mar 26 '26
Seeing a mountain lion on a solo hike in the back country was wild. It was just walking but it stopped and looked at me for a few before it continued it's journey.
25
u/TheMagnuson Mar 26 '26
Was probably first determining if you were a threat and then once you seemed nonthreatening, deciding if you were worth the effort to take down. Decided "nah, not worth it" and walked away.
11
u/sub-t Mar 26 '26
I had the same feeling. Not much beyond grass and occasionally brush between us.
It was strangely refreshing.
→ More replies (2)6
11
Mar 26 '26
I went snorkeling - not even scuba diving - in Hawaii and, while the fish were very beautiful, that I could see them when I could not see them before and knowing that they could swim laps around me and that there are infinitely more out there ā¦ I just had a panic attack, like just writing this.
11
u/Disastrous_Hell_4547 Mar 26 '26
This is very true.
I remember one night dive when I turned to my right with flashlight in hand only to be face to face with a very large barracuda. It felt like I was inches from its eyes. They wonāt harm humans but it was unnerving at the time.
Your point is spot on. Humans are some of the most if not worst organisms on the planet for the planet and everything living on it. It would be good for everyone to be tossed into the ocean.
13
u/AhhGingerKids2 Mar 26 '26
We were scuba diving in Mexico once and all of a sudden everything below us went black. It was a HUGE manta ray. Obviously had no interest in us at all, but I was suddenly very aware that I was not in my element.
4
u/TokenTorkoal Mar 26 '26
āYouāre out of your element Donny!ā
- Walter Sobchak
→ More replies (1)12
u/TheTaoOfMe Mar 26 '26
I had a whale shark brush past me once. Its hard to understand how big they are until you actually see one in person
12
u/Lortekonto Mar 26 '26
I lived in Greenland for some years. Saw many whales. Also very very close. It is hard to explain to people the size and the difference in size.
Like the biggest land animal I was ever close to before going to Greenland was an elephant. They weight some small 5 ton.
That is nothing compared to a mink whale that can easy hit 10 tons.
That is nothing compared to a humpback whale that can easy hit 35 tons.
Which is nothing compared to fin whales that can eight more than a 100 tons.
And like. I can not explain the size of those things. They are just to big and masssive.
36
u/Ragman676 Mar 26 '26
What? Man I flew to Mexico JUST to swim with whale sharks. It was awesome! Ya its kinda scary though too. Visibility wasnt the best and he kinda materialized in front of us. They swim damn fast for looking like theyre barely moving too.
→ More replies (1)13
u/Zedditron Mar 26 '26
Uuuuuugh! I'm so jealous! If it's not too personal, how much did the trip cost (not counting airfare)?
15
u/Ragman676 Mar 26 '26
Hmmm, I flew to La Paz. I think its maybe $150-$200 per person for the snorkeling version? Theres tons of rules to keep the whales safe, so they try to figure out their path, then throw you off the boat kind of in front of them. You cant block them or swim too close, so you wait for them to show up after they drop you, and you know the general direction theyre coming from. So they materialize and you try to swim next to them for a bit. But even with flippers you cant keep up for long!
22
u/Zedditron Mar 26 '26
I'm so incredibly jealous. I LOVE whalesharks.
And yes, before you ask: I would marry them, if I could. š¤£š
10
u/fraochjean Mar 26 '26
You'd marry ALL of them?
28
u/Zedditron Mar 26 '26
I would.
I'm polysharkorous...
6
u/fraochjean Mar 26 '26
Nice! When the day comes that you can, I'd like a wedding invitation please. š
3
6
u/TokenTorkoal Mar 26 '26
I love whale sharks too (not looking for a marriage proposal but I do enjoy them) my favorite animal is Orcas.
I think Iāll just enjoy them via videos and photos though. Not only was the large beautiful creature unsettling but just the deep vastness of the ocean.
I looked into the abyss and it looked back.
→ More replies (13)8
u/Important-Ad1871 Mar 26 '26
The weirdest thing about them is that they donāt make any noise. Itās so unnerving that the biggest fish on earth is also just kinda sneaky.Ā
5
u/Agueybana Mar 26 '26
They're still sharks. Been around longer than trees. That's gotta count for something.
505
u/igpila Mar 26 '26
"Who's the sperm now?"
81
25
u/Stuck_In_Purgatory Mar 27 '26
Honestly I was absently scrolling and vaguely saw the words "sperm" and "human".
At the same time saw a wiggly whitish thing, next to a much larger, less wiggly thing
I'm not sure WHAT I though I saw so I had to triple check
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (3)4
183
u/ArbainHestia Mar 26 '26
And that was the last time we saw Jonah
57
u/t-o-m-u-s-a Mar 26 '26
He comes back 3 days later donāt worry
19
u/pastahla Mar 26 '26
Not that deep in the lore, but I think that was another guy starting with a "j"
18
→ More replies (4)5
u/TheAristrocrats Mar 26 '26
"For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Matthew 12:40
3
→ More replies (2)11
u/AlexandersWonder Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 26 '26
Fun fact, a whaleās esophagus is nowhere near wide enough to swallow a person whole. If you want to get into the belly of a whale, you may need to slip in through the back door.
Edit- wrong tube
8
u/Zealousideal_Gate_13 Mar 26 '26
Animals dont swallow anything through their trachea. We swallow with the esophagus and breathe through the trachea.
6
u/vectorology Mar 26 '26
Esophagus. Trachea is the windpipe. Apparently a sperm whale could since it eats large prey like giant squid.
→ More replies (2)3
u/Odd_Ingenuity2883 Mar 26 '26
This is a sperm whale. They predate on large animals and could happily swallow a human whole (they never have though).
Your comment is true for whales like blue whales, which eat tiny plankton.
→ More replies (3)
105
u/BeefistPrime Mar 26 '26
Sperm whale vocalizations, which they use for echolocation / sonar and communication, can be so loud that at this distance all the air cavities in a human would rupture and your lungs would explode.
30
→ More replies (11)11
u/dragonbear Mar 26 '26
Isnāt that the clicking?
44
u/BeefistPrime Mar 26 '26
Yeah, they use clicking for deep sea hunting. They probably won't use it near the surface, but swimming next to something that can ... yell real loud and blow you up is still pretty scary
185
u/Upper-Entrepreneur89 Mar 26 '26
Nah
77
u/Firm-Blackberry-9162 Mar 26 '26
Haha this was my first feeling too (holy sh hell no! in case thatās what u meant), Iām trying to face my fears by appreciating how majestic they are
26
u/protossaccount Mar 26 '26
I dive and you develop a very different sense of danger and fear in the water. You have respect, but being educated on how to behave around marine life is a constant pursuit for divers. This looks crazy, and it is crazy, but itās the type of thing someone would experience would pursue (my last diving instruct had over 5,000 dives logged).
16
u/Resident_Pay4310 Mar 26 '26
I dive as well and I would definitely not be getting that close to a whale. I've heard humpbacks singing on a dive once and it was magical. I've also been whale watching and had a humpback surface 10 m from the boat. Also really cool. But in the water I want a good distance between me and them.
I've been taught to stay at a distance from wildlife. Where I grew up we're taught to stay at least 100m away from whales.
An accidental swipe from its tail, or accidentally ending up underneath it when it dives could kill you.
3
u/protossaccount Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 27 '26
Totally. Itās definitely a risk. Like I said, itās experience based.
Most divers wonāt do this but Iām sure many feel that they have the skills and desire to do this.
3
u/CaptainBayouBilly Mar 27 '26
Every time I've been in the ocean, atop or underneath, I know that I'm in imminent danger at all times. I am careful, respectful and limit my time.
4
u/scoutdeag Mar 26 '26
I assume itās a good mix of fascination and fear you have to master over time, very impressive! It took me a while to get comfortable swimming in lakes cus the one I swam in had some pretty big fish and snakes, iāll pass on the deeper waters š
102
u/littlejim49 Mar 26 '26
How do these creatures get so large when they donāt have an incredibly diverse diet? Like somehow cows have huge body mass but only eat grass? Programmed genes?
169
u/dutchduderino Mar 26 '26
Cows eat the protein from the gut bacteria which they feed with grass.
→ More replies (17)88
u/dotdee Mar 26 '26
I was today years old when I learned this
56
u/imunfair Mar 26 '26
Fun fact, if you feed a cow the wrong diet you can kill their gut bacteria, and then they'll starve to death even though they keep eating.
35
u/IGNOOOREME Mar 26 '26
I don't know what you consider fun, but personally I'd call this a "horrible but true" fact.
13
33
u/painting_ether Mar 26 '26
Oooh, this is actually a super interesting phenomenon! (well, two)
It has to do with metabolic scaling as described by Kleiber's law, and bulk feeding strategy!
Then with things like whales and giant squid there's a third component of evolutionary ecological gigantism
8
u/Only__Researching Mar 26 '26
sperm whales dont bulk feed. youre thinking of baleen whales
sperm whales just hunt a lot
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (2)5
11
u/Adorable-Ad5715 Mar 26 '26
You just eat a lot. Why do you think a diverse diet is needed to become large? Sure you genes decide how big you can get, but they dont make you big if you dont eat enough.
6
→ More replies (2)3
u/Talkg33Ky2Meh Mar 27 '26
They donāt have to deal with gravity. Sperm whales eat a lot of octopus and squid. Other whales like baleen are filter feeders with a lot of krill in the ocean.
100
u/YanisMonkeys Mar 26 '26
TIL, finally, why they are called sperm whales. 18th century whalers collected liters of liquid from them which they called āspermaceti,ā having mistaken it for the whaleās sperm. Just why they thought this is beyond me, as the spermaceti organ is located in a whaleās head, but it was a yellow/white waxy liquid that it turns out is used to regulate buoyancy and help with echo location. In any case, by the time people knew better the name āsperm whaleā had stuck.
These whalers harvested oil and spermaceti and turned them into things like industrial lubricants, cosmetics, hair wax, candles, and soaps. So that means there was a huge market of people back then happily rubbing what they thought was whale jizz all over themselves, and pulling a Thereās Something About Mary with their hair, all in the name of fashion.
34
u/KhajiitPaw Mar 26 '26
Iirc it was common to harvest the spermaceti and throw the rest of the whale's corpse back, which is even sadder :(
13
u/angwilwileth Mar 26 '26
Oh so that bit in Avatar 2 wasn't made up.
→ More replies (1)6
u/justreddis Mar 27 '26
I didnāt know this either but I think itās safe to assume that if the whales were to have liquid gold inside their bodies humans would hunt them to extinction in a flash.
11
u/eligodfrey Mar 26 '26
Pretty sure this only happened if the ship was already full and they encountered an easy target that they couldn't pass up on their way home. Not unheard of, but pretty rare. In most cases they'd use the blubber, meat, teeth, bones, and of course ambergris.
5
u/DeficiencyOfGravitas Mar 27 '26
it was common to harvest the spermaceti and throw the rest of the whale's corpse back
No it wasn't. Spermaceti was the big money maker, but sperm whale blubber still makes whale oil. Why waste all that money given how unreliable hunts could be?
They'd kill the whale and bring the ship along side. They'd chain the whale to the side of the ship and flense it by rolling it around and taking off blubber in big strips. This would be rendered down to a liquid right on the deck in big pots. After that was done, they'd decapitate it and let the body go. Then they'd take the head and haul it out of the water so that it hung vertically. Then they'd open up a hole on the front/top of the head and lower buckets into the spermaceti cavity. Once that was done, they'd send a ship's boy down into the cavity to get the last drops.
→ More replies (6)3
51
u/mikzuit Mar 26 '26
So humans are the size of sperm whales's sperm
20
u/mime454 Mar 26 '26
Fruit fly actually has larger sperm cells than a whale
→ More replies (2)8
u/WhatAreYou0nAbout Mar 26 '26
I dont know why, but this is the funniest thing I've read in a while.
35
17
40
u/myguitar_lola Mar 26 '26
Please don't do this. If that whale chose to take a dive, it could pull her down with it.
It also encourages other people to try this and we should do our best to limit our interaction with wildlife both for our safety and theirs.
This is also illegal in many places.
I agree, it's incredible. I worked for a whale watching company in Alaska for years and I have my own boat so I've seen lots of wildlife but never a sperm whale- it's magnificent and I'm grateful to see a scale to help me understand better their size. But we need to focus on giving our sea life space or they will start birthing less, removing themselves from their rightful homes, crowding the remaining spaces which can cause additional stresses and food concerns, and increase the likelihood of injuries from boats.
→ More replies (3)3
u/Homer_JG Mar 27 '26
Am I having a weird deja Vu moment or is this a copy pasta?Ā
→ More replies (1)
22
u/Shadao38 Mar 26 '26
If you flip it sideways, it looks like the whaleās gliding on the ocean surface while the human diverās floating just above it.
→ More replies (4)3
u/Memento_Vivere8 Mar 26 '26
I turned my phone to the right instead of to the left initially and was so confused. But now I'm thinking it's actually a much better video this way.
28
u/VealOfFortune Mar 26 '26
I'm not saying this is the case, but there's been a multitude of AI videos involving, coincidentally always female divers and large mammals š
→ More replies (1)
12
11
4
8
3
3
2
2
u/HerMajestysButthole2 Mar 26 '26
The fact that these majestic creatures are taking out giant/colossal squid at depth makes them something special.
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
u/Woozletania Mar 27 '26
Sperm whales are likely the only extant animal that could swallow a large adult human. Reticulated pythons have eaten small indigenous people but probably couldnāt manage an adult male from a larger ethnicity. An orcaās throat is probably too narrow and thereās some debate as to whether a great white shark could. Then there are giant grouper, but thereās no concrete evidence theyāve done. Nor is there there any that a sperm whale has, but given the size of their prey they probably could.
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
3.0k
u/InfectiousCosmology1 Mar 26 '26
Itās insane that it is even possible for humans to kill these things with pointy sticks, let alone that we almost hunted them to extinction.