Of those we’re able to easily study, that is—the arctic bowhead whale seems to live two hundred years or longer, but we don’t know enough about their sex lives to establish whether older females are commonly giving birth at two hundred. We only learned they live as long as they do because we’ve found nineteenth-century harpoons in their sides. It’s very hard to study the longevity of whales that live in deep, cold water, particularly when most scientists are only professionally active for forty-odd years.
