This Is What The Oldest Whale in The World Can Do

In 2007, a group of Iñupiat hunters in northern Alaska legally hunted a bowhead whale off the coast. But, as they were cutting deep into the blubber of the whale’s neck, their tools hit something hard. They had struck solid metal. It was completely fused with the tissue around it and clearly very old. They sent it over to historians to figure out exactly what it was, and the results didn’t make any sense.

 The object was a bomb lance tip, and it was manufactured in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1880, which means this exact harpoon was fired into this exact whale by a commercial whaling ship over 120 years ago and just never detonated. And because scientists knew the minimum age and size of whales targeted by whalers, they estimated this whale to be over 200 years old.

 This whale was born before the American Civil War. It was swimming in the Arctic Ocean while Abraham Lincoln was president. It survived the invention of the lightbulb, two world wars, the moon landing, and the invention of the internet, all while casually swimming through freezing water with a harpoon lodged in its neck.

Confirming that this whale was over 200 years old immediately made the bowhead the longest-living mammal on the entire planet. This isn’t possible with blue whales. This isn’t possible with sperm whales. In fact, no other whale on Earth comes even close to living half as long as this whale is, and especially not with a bomb tip in its neck.

 So, what is actually allowing this whale to not be able to die? To understand why a 200-year-old whale makes absolutely no sense, you have to look at how aging and disease actually work in living things. Every single time a cell in your body divides to create a new cell, it has to copy your DNA. And every single time it copies that DNA, there’s a microscopic chance that it makes a mistake.

 Most of the time, these mistakes are harmless, but sometimes a cell mutates in a very specific way that causes it to start dividing out of control. That is cancer. [music] So, logically, cancer is a numbers game. The more cells you have [music] and the longer you live, the more times your cells have to divide, which means you have more chances to accidentally create a cancer cell.

 Humans have about 30 trillion cells. We get cancer pretty frequently. Now, look at the bowhead whale. These animals grow up to 60 ft long and can weigh over 100 tons. They have thousands of times more cells than a human being. If biology works the way it’s supposed to, an animal with that many cells should be getting terminal cancer before it even grows up.

 Because they have so many cells dividing inside a 100-ton body, they essentially have billions of more chances to mutate every single day. We do have other animals on Earth that live for a very long time, like the Galapagos tortoise, which can easily clear 150 years. But, tortoises are small.

 They don’t have a massive amount of cells and their bodies move incredibly slowly. The bowhead is the size of a submarine. I mean, just look at this thing. It’s massive. Realistically, a bowhead whale should be completely riddled with tumors by the time it turns 30, but they aren’t. They’re somehow completely avoiding the normal limits of aging and disease and living for over two centuries completely tumor-free.

 So, how is this animal completely ignoring the rules of biology? Well, look at where they actually choose to live. And it’s miserable. If you look at the migration patterns of almost every other large whale on Earth, they all do essentially the same thing. Humpback whales, gray whales, and blue whales will spend their summers feeding in cold water, but when winter hits, they completely abandon those feeding grounds.

 They swim thousands of miles south to places like Mexico, Hawaii, or the Caribbean to breed and raise their calves in warm, comfortable water. They’re basically taking a giant biological vacation. The bowhead whale completely ignores this. They live in the Arctic Ocean and they never leave. They’re the only baleen whale on the planet that spends its entire life in the freezing waters of the Arctic and this environment is genuinely miserable.

 Because salt water has a lower freezing point than fresh water, the water temperature in the Arctic actually drops below 32° Fahrenheit without turning to ice. The whales are swimming in liquid that’s literally below the freezing point of normal water, which is not exactly ideal. During the winter, the sun doesn’t rise for months.

 The entire ocean goes completely dark, the water is freezing and the surface is basically a death trap. But this miserable environment is actually the first step in how they live for 200 years. When you live in water this cold, your body is forced to adapt. The freezing temperatures mean the bowhead’s metabolism is incredibly slow.

 Their heart rate drops, their physical movements are sluggish, their body temperature is heavily regulated to conserve as much energy as physically possible. In biology, there’s a general rule. To live a very long time, you have to live very slow. By staying in the freezing Arctic, the bowhead forces its entire biological system to run on a lower gear, which drastically reduces the amount of stress placed on their cells over time.

 But choosing to live in the freezing Arctic creates one massive issue. Because eventually, you have to breathe. Whales are mammals. They don’t have gills. No matter how deep they dive or how cold the water gets, they eventually have to come to the surface to breathe oxygen. And in the Arctic Ocean, the surface doesn’t always exist.

During the winter, millions of square miles of the ocean surface freezes completely solid. The sea ice can easily reach over 2 ft thick. For any other whale, swimming under this ice means you’re completely screwed. If you run out of breath and the surface above you is solid ice, you simply drown. Which is a pretty massive design flaw for an animal that lives in the ocean.

 So, how does a bowhead whale breathe when the ocean has a roof on it? They smash through it. If you look at the skeleton of a bowhead whale, the proportions look almost comical. Their skull is absolutely massive. It makes up a full third of their entire body length. A 60-ft whale will have a 20-ft long head. And their skull isn’t just large.

 It’s incredibly thick and shaped with a distant upward curve. They basically just have a solid rock as a head. Seriously, look at the skeleton. It genuinely just looks like a giant helmet. When a bowhead needs to breathe and the ocean is frozen over, they just find a spot where the ice is slightly thinner, angle their massive bodies upward, and accelerate towards the surface.

 They use the sheer momentum of their 100-ton body to slam the crown of their head directly into the bottom of the ice sheet. They can shatter through solid sea ice up to 2-ft thick just to take a breath. No other animal on Earth is capable of doing this. They’ll literally headbutt a frozen ocean until it breaks.

 And because their blowholes are positioned at the very peak of this massive skull, they only need to crack a small hole in the ice to exhale, take a deep breath, and sink back down into the dark. But, headbutting a frozen ocean only solves the breathing problem. It doesn’t stop the fact that they’re still swimming in literal ice water.

 Living your entire life in below freezing water means that your entire body heat is constantly being sucked away into the ocean. If a human falls in the Arctic Ocean, hypothermia sets in within minutes and you’re dead shortly after. Or really, if any normal mammal falls in. To survive this, the bowhead whale just grew a ridiculous amount of fat.

All whales have blubber, which is a dense layer of fat that traps heat inside their bodies. But, the bowhead takes this to an entirely different extreme. The blubber can reach up to 2 ft thick. This is the thickest layer of fat on any animal on the planet. For comparison, a blue whale, which is significantly larger than a bowhead, only has blubber that’s about a foot thick.

 The bowhead is walking around with double the insulation of the largest animal on Earth. This blubber is so dense and so thick that it completely isolates their internal organs from the freezing water outside. They can comfortably swim through sub-zero temperatures without their core body temperature dropping at all. But, walking, or I guess swimming around wrapped in 2 ft of solid fat actually provides an even crazier advantage that has nothing to do with the cold.

 It makes you practically impossible to eat. When you’re a slow-moving 100-ton animal floating around in the ocean, you’re eventually going to attract predators. And in the ocean, the only predator that actually poses a threat to large whales is the orca. Killer whales are pack hunters.

 They regularly hunt large whales by surrounding them and physically holding them underwater until they drown. But, they just can’t really do this to a bowhead. First of all, drowning a bowhead is incredibly difficult because their entire survival strategy is based on hiding under solid ice. When orcas attack, the bowhead will simply swim into dense pack ice where the orcas, who have smaller dorsal fins and no battering ram skulls, cannot follow without getting trapped themselves.

 But, even if the orcas catch a bowhead in open water, they run into a huge physical problem. Orcas’ teeth are about 4 in long. Bowhead blubber is 24 in thick. So, when an orca bites a bowhead whale, absolutely nothing happens. Their teeth aren’t even long enough to reach the actual muscle or vital organs. They’re just biting into a massive wall of fat.

 Now, obviously, orcas are smart. They know they can’t easily kill a full-grown adult, so they almost exclusively target calves or sick individuals. And even then, it’s an exhausting fight that often ends with the bowhead simply swimming away into the ice. A fully grown bowhead is basically untouchable. They’re too thick to be bitten, too strong to be drowned, and they hide in an environment that kills, well, literally everything else.

You’d think that an animal this massive would need to hunt down huge schools of fish or large squid to survive. But chasing down fast-moving prey requires a ton of energy. And as we already established, the bowhead’s entire strategy for living to 200 years old relies on conserving energy and moving slowly.

 So, the largest creature in the Arctic solves its food problem by eating the absolute smallest creatures in the ocean. Bowhead whales are filter feeders, kind of like blue whales. Instead of teeth, they have massive plates hanging down from the roofs of their mouths that look like this. This is called baleen. And because the bowhead has a skull that’s 20 ft long, they also hold the record for the longest baleen of any whale.

 Their baleen plates can grow up to 13 ft long. When it’s time to eat, the bowhead doesn’t chase anything. They simply open their massive mouths and slowly swim forward. Water rushes in, passing through the baleen plates, which act like a giant sieve. The water filters out and millions of microscopic crustaceans called copepods get trapped in the bristles.

 The whale then uses its massive tongue to scrape the copepods off the baleen and swallows them whole. They can eat up to 2 tons of these tiny creatures every single day, all without ever having to sprint, fight, or struggle for a meal. They just open their mouths and drift. It’s the laziest, yet most effective hunting strategy on Earth.

 All of this is impressive, but it’s really just explaining the issues outside of their body. It still doesn’t answer, how do these guys still not have thousands of tumors? A few years ago, scientists finally managed to sequence the entire genome of the bowhead whale. They wanted to know exactly what was happening inside their cells that allowed a 100-ton animal to avoid tumors for two centuries.

 And what they found was completely insane. It turns out bowhead whale cells are actively equipped with genetic tools that human beings simply don’t have. Specifically, scientists found unique mutations in two major genes, the ERCC1 gene and the PCNA gene. In a human body, when a cell’s DNA gets damaged, the body usually only has two options.

 It either forces the cells to self-destruct or in bad cases, the cell ignores the damage, mutates, and eventually turns into cancer. Bowhead whale cells have a third option. They actually fix the damage. When their DNA gets damaged, these modified genes literally pause the cell division process. They stop the cell from multiplying, cut out the damaged section of the DNA code, and patch it correct before allowing the cell to continue dividing.

 Their bodies are actively proofreading their own genetic code. If a cell starts to mutate towards cancer, the bowhead’s immune system identifies the error and repairs the DNA before a tumor can even begin to form. Their massive size doesn’t even matter because their cells are quite literally built to fix themselves.

 So naturally, this brings up an incredibly obvious question. If we know exactly which genes allow the bowhead to repair its DNA and for 200 years, why don’t we just put these genes into humans? The idea of taking cancer-resistant genes from a whale and applying them to human medicine sounds like the perfect solution.

 If we could repair our own DNA the way a bowhead does, we could theoretically cure cancer and extend the human lifespan well past 150 years. But realistically, doing this would come with some severe side effects because you can’t just take one piece of a bowhead’s biology without taking the rest of the package. The reason the bowhead’s DNA repair system works so well is because their cells divide incredibly slowly.

 These modified genes have plenty of time to find errors and fix them simply because the whale’s body is running at a fraction of the speed of a human. If you put this system into a human, you’d have to drastically slow down our cell division, too. And cell division is what allows us to heal. If you’ve got a cut on your arm, it might [music] take months to heal.

 Broken bones would take years. And human children would take decades just to grow up. Furthermore, running a metabolism [music] that slow means you’d constantly feel cold and exhausted. You wouldn’t have the energy to run, jump, or live a normal human life. You might live to be 250 years old, [music] and you might never get cancer, but you’d spend those two centuries living like a rock, which [music] honestly doesn’t sound like a great time.

 The entire lifespan is a massive trade-off. They get to live for 200 years, but they have to spend 200 years moving slowly, living in freezing darkness, and conserving every ounce of energy they have. And even with all of those incredible adaptations, they’re still not immortal. Something’s out there still killing them.

 Despite all these crazy adaptations, bowhead whales do still die out in the wild. And ironically, the exact same thing that protects them from predators is usually what ends up killing them, the sea ice. The bowhead skull is incredibly powerful, and as we discussed, they can easily smash through 2 ft of solid ice to get a breath of fresh air.

 But the Arctic Ocean is unpredictable. Weather patterns can shift rapidly, and temperatures can plummet overnight. Sometimes, the ice freezes much thicker than 2 ft. If a bowhead is swimming underneath a massive sheet of ice, and they realize they’re running out of air, they’ll instinctively swim up and slam their head into the surface.

 But if the ice is 3 or 4 ft thick, the ice doesn’t break. The whale is now trapped. They’ll frantically search for a thinner spot or a natural crack in the ice, but if the frozen sheet stretches for miles, they physically cannot swim fast enough to find open water before their lungs give out.

 The exact same ice that keeps the orcas away ends up trapping them, and the whale simply drowns. This is the harsh reality of the Arctic. The environment is so extreme that even the animals perfectly adapted to it are constantly one mistake away from death. But for a long time, the ice wasn’t actually their biggest threat. For millions of years, the bowhead whale survival plan worked perfectly.

 Be massive, have incredibly thick blubber, move slowly, and stay in the ice. But in the 1700s and 1800s, this exact set of evolutionary traits turned them into the most heavily targeted animal on the planet. When commercial whaling exploded as an industry, ships sailed all over the world hunting whales for their blubber, which was boiled down into oil to light the street lamps of Europe and America.

 And whalers quickly realized that the bowhead was the absolute perfect target. First, they were slow. A bowhead whale cruises at about 2 to 3 mph, making them incredibly easy for rowboats to chase down and harpoon. Second, they had the thickest blubber of any whale, meaning a single bowhead could yield an absurd amount of high-quality oil.

 They also had the longest baleen, which was highly valuable at the time for making corsets and umbrella ribs. But the biggest reason they were targeted came down to basic physics. When you kill a large whale with a harpoon, the body usually sinks. And if you’re on a 19th-century whaling ship, how are you supposed to haul a 100-ton sinking carcass from up from the bottom of the ocean using nothing but ropes and pulleys? But the bowhead had 2 ft of blubber, and blubber is less dense than water.

 When you kill a bowhead whale, it doesn’t even sink. It floats perfectly on the surface, which makes them extremely convenient. Their thick armor, their slow speed, and their buoyancy, the exact traits that made them masters of the Arctic, made them completely defenseless against human ships. By the early 1900s, commercial whaling had absolutely decimated the bowhead population, pushing them to the absolute brink of extinction.

 They were built to survive orcas and ice, but not really harpoons. Eventually, the world moved on from whale oil. Petroleum was discovered, electricity became widespread, and commercial whaling of the bowhead was officially banned in the 20th century to prevent them from going completely extinct. And this is where their insane lifespan finally worked to their advantage.

 Usually, when a species is pushed to the brink of extinction, it takes many, many generations for the population to recover. The few surviving animals have to breed, their children have to grow up and breed, and it takes centuries to rebuild the numbers. But the bowhead whale doesn’t operate on a normal timeline.

 Because they live for over 200 years, the whales didn’t need to rely on dozens of new generations to rebuild their population. The exact same whales that survived the harpoons in the 1800s simply waited for the ships to leave, and then went right back to reproducing. A female bowhead whale can continue having calves well [music] into her hundreds.

 Their population has bounced back incredibly well over the past century, and a huge part of that success is simply because the individuals were capable of outliving the era of human hunting. They basically just sat under the ice and went, “Yeah, let us know when they leave.” And because of how long they live, the bowhead whale actually has a level of cultural complexity that makes them kind of weird.

 Bowhead whales are incredibly vocal, and I know other whales make loud sounds, too, but bowheads don’t make simple clicks or calls like other whales. They’re singing. And scientists who have recorded bowhead vocalizations have discovered that these songs are highly complex, featuring multiple different melodies, overlapping notes, and distant phrasing.

 It has been compared to hearing a jazz band improvising underwater, just a 100-ton freezing cold jazz band. Today, the bowhead whale is facing a completely new threat, and it’s one that their 200-year-old bodies aren’t adapted to handle. The Arctic sea ice is melting. At first glance, you might think less ice would actually be a good thing.

 I mean, less ice means they don’t have to smash their heads through a frozen surface just But, the ice is the only thing keeping them safe. As the ice coverage shrinks, the Arctic Ocean is opening up, and that means the orcas, who previously couldn’t navigate the thick pack ice, are now able to travel much further north.

 The bowheads are losing their primary hiding spots, exposing their calves to significantly more predation from killer whales. Furthermore, the lack of ice means human ships are moving in. Commercial shipping lanes are now cutting directly through the Arctic, bringing massive cargo ships into waters that used to be completely silent.

 For an animal that relies on complex songs to communicate in the dark, the roar of massive ship propellers is completely blinding them. The environment they spent millions of years adapting to is changing, and you can’t outlive a melting ocean. The bowhead whale isn’t anywhere near as famous as the blue whale, but it’s arguably even more incredible.

 We’re still learning things about them, and we don’t actually know their true limits to age. Maybe it’s possible that some live near 300 years instead, which would rival them with Greenland sharks. But, in any case, these guys are probably one of the coolest whales, or even just animals, on this planet. And hey, other whales are still cool, too, though.