There’s no shortage of animals out there that could eat a whole human. But there aren’t many that could eat a human whole.
Most top predators have the good manners to chew their food, or at least take bites out of it for swallowing in manageable chunks. But some do wolf it down in one. And tales of people being ingested in a single gulp go back at least as far as the Old Testament story of Jonah and the whale.
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And not just by whales, but by snakes, sharks, crocodiles and alligators, too. But is there any truth to them? Or are they just delicious yarns? We take a look
Can any animals swallow a human whole? Here are 10 that potentially could...
Sperm whale
The sperm whale is probably what most of us imagine when we think of the great sea creature that swallowed Jonah (although some versions describe it as a huge fish rather than a whale). A more recent story – one that is strikingly similar to Jonah’s - involves a 19th-century whaler named James Bartley who, it is said, was swallowed by a harpooned sperm whale that had destroyed his boat in the South Atlantic.
Like Jonah, Bartley supposedly lived to tell his tale. He was cut free by his shipmates 36 hours later, when the whale finally succumbed to its injuries, although he was blind, hairless and had bleached skin for the rest of his life.
It’s true that sperm whales swallow their prey whole. Their numerous peg-like teeth are used only for getting a grip on slippery seafood prey such as giant squid. And if they can ingest a giant squid, they might well be able to handle a human.
However, the original account, published anonymously in various US newspapers in 1891, contains historical inaccuracies that cast serious doubt on the story. It is also highly unlikely that anyone could possibly survive such an ordeal. The inside of a sperm whale is not somewhere you sit down, light a match and wait to be rescued. If you don’t drown or suffocate on the way down, the whale’s multiple muscular stomachs could crush the life out of you. And if that doesn’t finish you off, the acid bath surely would.
Green anaconda
The green anaconda might not be the longest snake in the world (that title goes to the reticulated python), but it is probably the heaviest, reaching over 100kg. These muscular South American constrictors can kill and swallow caimans, tapirs, pigs and capybaras, although there are no confirmed records of their eating humans, perhaps because they tend to live in remote areas where there are few people.
That said, it seems they are not averse to trying if they get the chance. In 2024 a video emerged of a man wrestling with an anaconda that had wrapped its muscular coils around him in a Brazilian river. He only manages to free himself with the help of a friend and by biting the snake’s head.
Saltwater crocodile
Saltwater crocodiles are the largest of all living reptiles. The biggest males can exceed 6m in length and a tonne in weight. They certainly kill and eat people with some regularity (there were 106 crocodile-inflicted deaths in Australia alone between 1971 and 2013), but they are not known for swallowing their victims whole.
Instead, they dismantle their prey using a manoeuvre called the ‘death roll’, which involves grasping a limb or head in their jaws and rolling vigorously in the water until it separates from the body, and then swallowing it.
But then again, some humans are smaller than others’ legs, in which case, it’s perhaps not out of the question.
Great white shark
One of the deadliest animals in the ocean, the great white is responsible for more unprovoked attacks on humans and more fatalities than any other shark species. As the biggest of the predatory sharks, at up to around 6m in length, they are the most likely to be able to process a whole human.
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And perhaps they could. But that’s not generally how great whites operate. Their many razor-sharp teeth are a pretty good indication that they prefer to bite chunks out of their food.
Whale shark
If any animal should be capable of swallowing a human whole, it is surely the whale shark. It is, after all, a shark that’s the size of a whale.
But the world’s biggest fish, which can reach 18m in length, is a slow-swimming, gentle giant that has no interest in eating anything much larger than small fish. Like many of the largest sea creatures, it feeds on plankton.
By swimming around with its enormous mouth wide open, it takes on huge volumes of water from which it extracts tiny plants and animals using its sieve-like gills.
While it’s not impossible that someone could end up in a whale shark’s mouth by mistake, it’s a scenario that the shark is probably as keen as a human to avoid, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that it has ever happened.
Megalodon
You’d need a time machine to get swallowed by what may be the biggest shark that has ever lived and one of our greatest prehistoric sea monsters.
This active predator prowled the world’s oceans until about four million years ago, and what little we know about it comes from fossilised teeth, the biggest of which are about 17cm long, and a few vertebrae (the cartilage skeletons of sharks don’t preserve well).
Estimates of Megalodon’s body length range from 10m up to more than 18m - three times the length of the largest great whites. We’ll probably never know if they could have swallowed a human whole, but you surely couldn’t put it past them.
Blue whale
It’s no great surprise that the biggest animal that has ever existed comes equipped with a very big mouth. It can open it very wide, too – all the better for taking enormous gulps of seawater from which it filters out the krill (shrimp-like crustaceans) that it feeds on almost exclusively.
A 27m-long blue whale may take in 150 tonnes of water in a single mouthful, so it is unlikely that any human that sneaked in there by mistake would even be noticed - until, that is, the whale tried to swallow it.
Because a blue whale’s oesophagus is only about 10cm in diameter, which is perfect for handling large volumes of tiny krill, but rules out the possibility of anything much larger passing into the stomach.
Komodo dragon
At up to 3m long and nudging 100kg, Komodo dragons are the largest of all living lizards (crocodiles can be bigger, but they are not lizards). These slavering, opportunistic predators are endemic to Komodo and a few other Indonesian islands.
It is armed with up to 60 serrated teeth, tipped with iron, that are wielded in a ‘grip and rip’ mode of attack and is one of the world's deadliest reptiles. Victims that are not killed outright may die subsequently of blood loss. There is also evidence that their bites are venomous. Larger prey is pulled apart and swallowed in chunks, but anything up to the size of a young goat can be swallowed whole, as widely-available video evidence testifies.
So could they swallow a human? A small one perhaps, although there are no documented cases. Komodos certainly do kill people once in a while. Komodo National Park officials recorded 24 attacks on people between 1974 and 2012, five of which were fatal. Many victims are attacked when they are answering a call of nature in the bushes.
Humpback whale
Michael Packard is perhaps the only person alive who can describe first-hand what it’s like to be swallowed. In June 2021, he was diving for lobsters off the coast of Massachusetts when everything went black.
Packard thought he had been taken by a great white shark, until he felt around and found no teeth, when he realised he was in the mouth of a huge baleen whale. It turned out to be a humpback, a species that herds fish and krill within walls of bubbles before lunging, mouth open wide, at the school.
Packard just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, ‘swallowed’ isn’t quite the right word here. A humpback whale’s throat cannot stretch wide enough to accommodate a human. But Packard didn’t know that. He resigned himself to his fate and thought of his family. It took the whale 30 to 40 seconds to realise its mistake and spit him out again.
Packard escaped with a dislocated knee and something to tell the grandchildren.
Reticulated python
This is the only species that can be said for certain to swallow people whole.
Pythons, like boas and anacondas, kill their prey by constriction rather than with venom. Following an initial grasping bite, they coil their body around their victim and squeeze – very hard. Death is by asphyxiation. Prey is always swallowed whole. The snakes’ slack-hinged jaws and elastic skin allow them to open wide enough to allow the passage of animals of a girth that far exceeds their own.
Reports of people being swallowed by reticulated pythons in South and Southeast Asia go back hundreds of years. But it was only in 2017 that solid evidence came to light, in tragic circumstances.
On Sunday 26 March, a 25-year-old man named Akbar left his home on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi to harvest palm oil and didn’t return. The next day, a search party came across a python sleeping off a meal, which going by the size of the bulge in its 7m-long body, had been a very big one. Worst fears were confirmed when the snake was killed and cut open – a process captured on video in gruesome detail.
Several other similar cases have been documented since, including that of a 54-year-old Sulawesi woman named Wa Tiba, who was ambushed while tending her vegetable garden in 2018. The discovery of her sandals and machete led the searchers to a very fat python about 30m away. Again, video evidence of the snake’s dissection confirms how Wa Tiba died.