211 and 115-year-old whales?

According to the NYTimes, the secret to long life is to “Take It Slow, Don’t Have Many Kids and Enjoy Cold Water“, that is if you are a whale:

“Eskimo hunters killed a bowhead whale off the coast of Alaska last month and began to chainsaw their way into its blubber. They stopped when the saw hit the tip of an old harpoon lodged deep inside the whale. Historians identified it last week as

part of a bomb lance, a harpoon manufactured for only a few years in the late 1800s in New Bedford, Mass. Whalers probably fired it at the bowhead around 1890, when the whale was probably a teenager, and it carried the harpoon for the next 115 years before finally being killed by a modern one.”

References:
Take It Slow, Don’t Have Many Kids and Enjoy Cold Water. NYTimes, 06/2007.
Image source: Wikipedia, public domain.

Original post by Clinical Cases