14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists imagined that giant whales can live up to 80 years. This has proven wrong: a 50-ton bowhead whale recently captured off the Alaskan coast in May had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck revealing survival to a similar hunt over a century ago.
Under the whale's blubber a 3?-inch (9 cm) arrow-shaped projectile was found, offering the researchers a new perspective on the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old, and on whales in general.
"No other finding has been this precise," said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Assessing a whale's age is a tricky thing to do; usually amino acids in the eye lenses are used. Whales older than a century are rare due to hunting, but the oldest could be almost 200 years old.
The bomb lance fragment was embedded in a bone between its neck and shoulder blade and comes from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890.
"The fragment was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time", Bockstoce said.
The small metal cylinder contained explosives fitted with a time-delay fuse, and blew out seconds after it penetrated into the whale, in order to kill it instantly.
"The device exploded and probably injured the whale. It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a non-lethal place. He couldn't have been that bothered if he lived for another 100 years."Bockstoce said.
The 49-foot (15 m) male whale died over 100 years later from a similar projectile.
"It's unusual to find old things like that in whales, and I knew immediately that it was quite old by its shape," said Craig George, a wildlife biologist for the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management.
A similar piece was encountered in a whale hunted near St. Lawrence Island in 1980, which now is re-analyzed.
"We didn't make anything of it at the time, and no one had any idea about their lifespan, or speculated that a bowhead could be that old," George said.
The arrow head has carved notches, a 19th century hunting tradition of the Alaskan whalers to mark ownership of the whale.
A hunting quota for the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission has been recently renewed.
10 Alaskan villages have received the permission to harvest 255 whales for five years. The arrow head will be displayed at the Inupiat Heritage Center in Barrow, Alaska.
