Great whales can live for well beyond 100 years - if we let them

Researchers have found that industrial hunting of these huge beasts has masked their ability to survive for centuries

- Philip Hoare

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 can live for a very long time.

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 the proteins in their eyes, and by old Inuit stone harpoon tips found embedded in bowheads that had survived earlier hunts.