“Being swallowed live is a common way for wild aquatic animals to die” by MichaelStJules

(This came up for this post, but seemed worth pointing out separately in its own post, so this post is mostly copied from there. I don’t consider the referenced sources here highly reliable for how exactly prey die when swallowed live, but I wasn't able to find anything better when I checked.) Predation is one of the most common ways for wild aquatic animals to die, perhaps the most common way (Dall et al., 1991 for penaeid shrimp, Hurst, 2007 for fish during the winter, Pauly & Palomares, 1989 for Peruvian anchoveta, Vollset et al., 2023). (Predation is also the largest cause of death among terrestrial vertebrates (Hill et al., 2019)). Predatory/carnivorous fish typically swallow their prey whole (Lindsay, 1984, Meekan et al., 2018, Luiz, 2019, Yasuda, 1960, Amundsen & Sánchez‐Hernández, 2019, St John, 1999, Gill, 2003, Lundstedt et al., 2004), and so without tearing or chewing. This is [...] --- First published: June 9th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/i4KbJubBJfsaNgAJP/being-swallowed-live-is-a-common-way-for-wild-aquatic --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.