The good news of the recovery of the bowhead whale in the oceans near Alaska carries with it an odd extra feature: Some of those whales may be more than 200 years old.
The bowhead's extra-thick blubber made it a prime target of the whaling industry of the 19th century. While there were only 1,200 of them as recently as the mid-80s, scientists today estimate their numbers as high as 14,000 (Apparently the bowheads spent the 90s having a lot of fun). Evidence suggests the whales may live very long lives when not menaced by one-legged rage monsters, and the author points out some of today's bowheads may have been alive when Herman Melville was writing Moby-Dick in 1851. Which would make some of those older bowheads some seriously swinging cats if they were part of that population surge in the last 20 years.
Of course, Ahab's nemesis was a sperm whale that he finally encounters in the southern Pacific Ocean, but anyway...
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