Looking down the throat of a Humpback Whale

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Dr. Kelsey Gil is  a postdoctoral researcher at UBC’s department of zoology and the lead author of a paper published in Current Biology that literally peaks down the throat of a lunge whale.
Lunge feeding whales (humpbacks, blue whales and fin whales) open their mouths as they accelerate towards their prey.
Gil explained that if, for example, a human were to do this in a swimming pool, they would have to swallow a volume of water equal to their body size.
“So you'd have to put yourself in your own mouth and then push out all the parts that you didn't actually want to swallow and keep the parts in your mouth that you did,” she said.
One of the questions explored in this paper, is why lunge whales don’t drown while they are doing this?
Humpback Whales in our area
Humpback whales only just returned to our area this past decade, after what appears to be a 140-year-absence.
They seem to have disappeared around the time the whaling industry collapsed, in 1871.
Lynne Jordan, former curator of the Cortes Island Museum, told Cortes Currents there was a sighting between Cortes and Quadra Islands around 2011 or 2012.
The number of humpback whales swimming into our area kept increasing and there were 58 sightings when the Vancouver Island. Aquarium took a census over the long weekend in August 2017.
Helen Hall, Executive Director of Friends of Cortes Island, explained, “Some of those may be the same humpback whales, but the same weekend a year ago, they only had two sightings - so there has been a huge increase in the numbers this summer.”
Sightings have become more common and on the Friends of Cortes Island website it says, “Unbelievably 86 individual humpback whales were identified in local waters just last year.”

Looking down a Lunge Whale’s throat
Scientists already knew a lot about lunge feeding, up until the moment prey enters a whale’s mouth.
Dr. Gil and her colleagues wanted to find out what happens next.
They found a kind of oral plug, at the back of the whale’s mouth, that seals off their upper airways during feeding. Otherwise food would be entering their nasal cavities.
As for the lunge whale’s ability to take in its own weight in water:
“Whales have this huge pouch that extends all the way from their mouth down to their belly button. That's where all this water is going. They open their mouths up, their tongue turns outside in and extends all the way down to their belly button,” explained Gil. “The pouch collapses back as they're closing their mouth. That's what's assisting all of the water to be pushed out through those baleen plates. It seems like a lot of work to get all of this krill, but clearly it's working very well for these animals considering they have managed to become the largest animals on the planet.”