Old Whale

A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago.

Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.

“No other finding has been this precise,” said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Calculating a whale’s age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It’s rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years old.

I didn’t know whales got that old. It’s a shame someone killed it. 

The “natives” get to kill as many whales as they want.  They kill many times more whales than all the “evil whaling nations” put together, but somehow the enviros never mention that awkward fact.
Funny about that.
In Canada they even let the Inuit kill whales, despite the fact that they were traditionally an inland people and never historically hunted whales.

Posted by  on  06/13  at  11:05 AM
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