For a long time, scientists believed that whales lived only a few decades. But recent research suggests that some species could easily surpass a century. This discovery changes our perspective on these marine giants and raises a question: why hadn’t we discovered this sooner? The answer lies as much in human history as in scientific challenges.
Discovering the Age of Marine Giants
Measuring a whale’s age is complicated. Researchers often use earplugs, which form in annual layers in the animal’s ear canal, much like the rings of a tree. But the oldest individuals have often been identified thanks to objects found in their blubber. In 2007, a harpoon made in 1885 was discovered in the blubber of a bowhead whale, showing that it was over 200 years old.
Greg Breed’s team at the University of Alaska Fairbanks studied right whales and showed that they could live much longer than previously thought. Breed explained in a study published on the university’s website: “We didn’t know how to determine the age of baleen whales before 1955—it was just after the end of industrial whaling. By the time we figured it out, there were almost no old whales left to study. So we assumed they didn’t live that long.”
Thanks to computer models, Greg Breed and his colleagues were able to estimate the theoretical age of the species. Southern right whales, for example, could live over 130 years. As for North Atlantic right whales, while it was previously thought that these giants of the sea lived only around 22 years, results now suggest they could actually live 100 to 150 years… if they had not been decimated by whaling.
Greg Breed and his team add: “Industrial whaling, which ended only 60 years ago for most species, would have required individuals who are now over 100 years old to have survived at least 40 years of intense hunting, and individuals over 150 years old would have had to survive 90 years of the same intense hunting.”
Another technique, aspartic acid racemization, allows scientists to “date” whales by measuring chemical changes in the eye’s lens. But finding older individuals remains difficult, often requiring lethal sampling, or being possible only through whaling and strandings.
The Ocean’s Memory and the Importance of the Elders
When older individuals disappear, it’s not just the population that loses out; it’s also the vital knowledge they pass on to younger generations. Greg Breed explains: “We are increasingly realizing that population restoration isn’t just about biomass or numbers. It’s about the knowledge these animals transmit to the next generation.” Older whales teach survival strategies that younger whales observe and replicate. Without them, cultural and behavioral transmission is broken, endangering the future of populations.
Even after the official end of whaling in 1986, other human pressures—fishing, trawling, ship collisions, ghost nets, ocean noise—continue to slow population recovery. “To reach healthy populations including older individuals, recovery could take hundreds of years. For animals that live 100 or 150 years and give birth to only one surviving calf every ten years, slow recovery should be expected,” warns Greg Breed.
The true longevity of whales is therefore far greater than we imagined. But human history has erased the oldest witnesses, and with them, an essential part of the memory and strategies that ensure the survival of future generations.
