In the long-term life of sea mammals, it was but a blip. However, thanks to human photography, it’s a moment frozen forever in time.
The humpback whale that accidentally ingested a sea lion while feeding was probably as startled as the smaller animal, the wildlife biologist who caught the “once in a lifetime” event on camera said.
“I get to see a lot of crazy stuff,” marine biologist and wildlife photographer Chase Dekker said, according to KRON-TV out of San Francisco. “Never this.”
Dekker, 27, was leading a routine whale-watching trip in Monterey Bay, Calif., with Sanctuary Cruises during a lower-key than usual feeding frenzy last Monday.
“It wasn’t a huge group, only three humpback whales and about 200 sea lions,” he told BBC News. “We’ve seen it all the way up to 100 whales with 3,000 sea lions, so it can get really insane.”
What normally happens is the animals feed simultaneously without getting in each others’ way, Dekker said.
The whales’ normal diet consists of small fish, plankton and small crustaceans called krill. The massive mammals practice lunge feeding, in which they gulp huge amounts of seawater and filter out the fish with comb-like structures called baleen, according to National Geographic.
In this case they were all feasting on anchovies, Dekker told BBC News.
He saw the sea lion on the humpback’s nose and started photographing, not even looking at his camera, he told CNN. He did not immediately know what images he had caught until it was over and he looked at the pictures.
“Just the other day I witnessed something out on Monterey Bay I had never seen before,” Dekker posted on Instagram. “While the humpbacks were lunge feeding on a school of anchovies, a sea lion apparently didn’t jump out of the way fast enough and got trapped inside the whales mouth! At some point the sea lion escaped and the whale seemed fine too as it continued to feed, but it must have been a strange experience for both parties!”
Such things are rarely seen, but they do happen, scientists said. However it’s more likely to occur with birds rather than something as large as a sea lion, a biologist with the Marine Education and Research Society in British Columbia, Canada, told National Geographic. In fact, the humpback’s gullet typically can’t even expand enough to let a large animal get through.
In the end there was no harm done. The sea lion swam away after the whale kept its mouth open a few seconds longer so it could swim away, Dekker surmised.
“I don’t think this would be any bother for a large sea lion,” Robert Delong, who leads NOAA’s California Current Ecosystem Program, told National Geographic. “These are very hardy animals, and to a sea lion, hanging out in a whale’s mouth would be like hanging out in a swimming pool.”
