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.
The paper, published in the journal Science Advances, suggests that the industrial hunting of great whales such as sperm, blue, fin and right whales “masked” the ability of these underwater giants to live to great ages.
It has been known since the 1990s that Arctic bowhead whales, with their slow metabolism enabled by cold waters and plentiful food, can reach 200 years old or more, as indicated by tests on their proteins in their eyes, and by old Inuit stone harpoon tips found embedded in bowheads that had survived earlier hunts.
But the new study indicates that the same lifespans may apply to right and fin whales. The first scientific reports of “extraordinary longevity” came when scientists examined the earplugs of fin and blue whales hunted by Japanese whalers in the late 1970s. By counting the annual growth layers of the plugs, they discovered that animals thought to live up to the age of 70 were at least 114 years old.
“At the time, these were the oldest documented non-human mammals,” say the authors of the study. “These superannuated ages should not be unexpected. Whales are the largest living animals, and body size is highly correlated with longevity.”
The study offers a better outlook for cetaceans – although only if urgent environmental and human threats are discounted. The moratorium on hunting great whales, introduced in 1982, has helped populations of humpback and fin whales to increase. The report suggests that, without human predation, whales could regain their natural longevity.
Conservationists would also argue that this is an even more pressing reason for countries such as Iceland and Japan to halt whaling. The report comes in the wake of news that Iceland wants to kill more fin whales, the second-largest animal on Earth, and Japan wants to resume hunting them.
The scientists achieved their new findings by analysing the lifespans of two similar species: the southern right whale – found below the equator – and the North Atlantic right whale, once plentiful off north European shores but now almost entirely confined to the eastern coast of the US. They discovered that up to 10% of the thriving southern species live past 130 years. Of the much-hunted northern species, only 10% lived beyond 47 years. The conclusion is clear: left alone, whales can live to be very old.
But it is a race against time. The population of the North Atlantic right whale, a close relative of the bowhead, is now so diminished after the intensive culls of the past, when it was the “right” whale to hunt due to its thick layer of oil-rich blubber, that it is beyond recovery. According to Massachusetts’ Center for Coastal Studies (CCS), which has carried out one of the longest-running studies of the critically endangered population, there are only 372 individuals left.
Declining genetic strength, ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, the effects of climate change and sound pollution have weakened them to the extent that they have now been declared “functionally extinct” in the eastern Atlantic, while the west Atlantic population is “not recovering”.
Dr Charles “Stormy” Mayo, senior scientist at the CCS, says: “Longevity is critically important to species that produce small numbers of young. So human-caused mortality – once hunting, now maritime industries – is shortening the whales’ natural lifespan and reproductive period so much that they are threatened with extinction.”
Christy Hudak, Mayo’s colleague at CCS, reports that the first right whales have just appeared off Cape Cod in Massachusetts on their annual migration north. The returning whales, identified from an aerial survey, are both juveniles, four and three years old.
The zooplankton on which they feed – straining the minute organisms through the bizarre, prehistoric-looking baleen plates of their car-sized jaws – is present unusually early this year. “It will be exciting to see if the food source will prove a banner season for right whales in Cape Cod Bay,” Hudak says, with guarded optimism.
In the winter months, these rare whales assemble in feeding and mating groups, just off the broad beaches of Cape Cod. The sight of them, rolling and diving in the freezing waters of the Atlantic, remains a sign of survival against the odds – despite what the future may bring.
• This article was amended on 2 January 2025. An earlier version said that carbon-dating was used to work out how old the Arctic bowhead whales were when in fact other tests were used to date the whales.
