Why Whales Don’t Choke - The New York Times

As water floods into the whale’s mouth, its throat pouch expands, leaving the whale looking like a bloated tadpole.

Scientists didn’t know how these whales avoided choking on prey-filled water and flooding their respiratory tracts during a lunge feeding event.

Lunge-feeding whales are also called rorqual whales and include two of the largest animals on Earth — the blue and fin whales.

Through lunge feeding, rorqual whales ingest thousands of pounds of food every day, a feeding strategy that allows them to maintain their hulking physiques, which can weigh more than 300,000 pounds in the case of blue whales.

When a whale lunges, the oral plug protects both tracts from being flooded by the water and the critters that the animal has taken in.

For the whale to ingest food, that oral plug needs to move.

Ari Friedlaender, who studies whale feeding behaviors at the University of California, Santa Cruz but was not involved in this research, sees immense value in filling in these anatomical blanks about whales