“Humpback whales have a small oesophagus and feed on small prey (small fish, krill), so they could not ‘devour’ or ‘swallow’ a human,” said María José Pérez Álvarez, a marine biologist at Universidad de Chile and Base Millennium Institute.
Although Simancas was unharmed, Pérez Álvarez cautions that human-whale interactions should be avoided at all costs: “A humpback whale is around 18 metres long.
Simancas and his father are both wildlife and outdoor enthusiasts, and Simancas maintains that neither saw the whale nor intentionally approached it.
As one of Simancas’s paddles had been damaged in the whale encounter, they turned back and navigated their way home by holding their rafts together, with one manning the left and the other in charge of the right paddle.
Adrián Simancas had been paddling for two hours in the calm but icy seas of the Strait of Magellan, off the coast of Chilean Patagonia, when something massive emerged from the water and dragged him under.
