Carl Zimmer reports in today’s New York Times (October 29, 2025) that a study published in the journal Nature offers clues to the extraordinarily long lifespan of the bowhead whale. How old and why? Despite centuries of hunting the “Arctic whale” by Dutch, English, Americans, French, Russians, Japanese, and indigenous people for their thick, oil-rich blubber and “bone” or baleen, specimens have been caught as recently as 2007 bearing harpoon fragments buried in their fat that were used in the late 19th century.
The Chase of the Bowhead Whale, Clifford Ashley – 1909
Scientists have estimated some bowheads live well over two hundred years, with some claiming the maximum natural lifespan of the leviathans to be 268 years, making bowheads the oldest living species of mammals by far. To put that into perspective, a whale born 268 years ago was born in 1787 when the U.S. Constitution was drafted.
So why do bowheads live as long as they do? Given how massive they are, one would assume their cells, multiplying in size from an egg to a massive animal the size of three garbage trucks, would sooner or later mutate and lead to cancer. One theory is their preferred habitat in the frozen waters of the Sea of Okhotsk, the Bering Sea, and the Arctic Ocean has something to do with their resiliency. This week, the scientists reporting in Nature say their research on live bowhead cells harvested from a whale taken by Alaskan Inuits revealed bowhead cells can repair DNA strands better than most animals, in large part due to the ‘”cold-inducible RNA-binding protein CIRBP” which is “highly expressed in bowhead fibroblasts and tissues.”
So yes, the cold has something to do with their long life-spans, but essentially bowheads are better are growing, and repairing their DNA than most species.
Why do I care? Writing my book, The Marginal Sea about the hunting of bowheads in Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk in the late 1850s left me with many questions about the state of the bowhead population given the intense pressure the American fleet placed on the Okhotsk stock between 1848 and 1865. According an estimate made in 1984 by R.C. Kugler that was published in a “Historical survey of foreign whaling: North America” in Arctic Whaling, as many as 15,000 bowheads were taken (with other killed but lost) in the Okhotsk alone. Today an estimated 10,000 to 25,000 bowheads are left, being classified as a species of “least concern” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But those estimate are worldwide. The population remaining in the Okhotsk is estimated to be less than 400 and that stock is considered endangered, despite the Russian’s declaration of their feeding grounds around the Shantar archipelago as a national park.
For all the carnage the commercial whaling fleet inflicted on the world’s whale population, I can wistfully imagine bowhead whales swimming today who escaped the harpoons of the men in my book, who along with 120 other ships and 4,000 other whalers massacred so many of these extraordinary giants in 1858. That puts history and time into perspective and reminds me of an anecdote I once read in American Heritage Magazine about a man who told of watching a parade as a child and meeting an old veteran of the Civil War, who stepped out of the ranks of marching veterans to shake his young hand and tell him, “Now you can tell your grandchildren you once shook the hand of a man who as a boy shook the hand of man who fought in the American Revolution.”
