‘Extraordinary longevity’: great whales can live a lot longer than we thought – if we leave them alone

A barnacled right whale, so named because they were the ‘right’ ones to hunt for their oil. While the southern hemisphere’s population is doing well, they are functionally extinct in the eastern Atlantic and fewer than 400 remain off North America. (Taken under NOAA permit #14603.) Photograph: Jeroen Hoekendijk

In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s epic novel of 1851, the author asks if whales would survive the remorseless human hunt. Yes, he says, as he foresees a future flooded world in which the whale would outlive us and “spout his frothed defiance to the skies”.

Moby Dick was a grizzled old sperm whale that had miraculously escaped the harpoons. But a new scientific paper is set to prove what oceanic peoples – such as the Inuit, Maōri and Haida – have long believed: that whales are capable of living for a very long time. Indeed, many more than we thought possible may have been born before Melville wrote his book.