Here's an interesting twist to a sad story: In May of this year, eskimos killed a 49-foot male bowhead whale, Balaena mysticetus, off the coast of Alaska and unexpectedly discovered that he had survived a similar hunt more than a century ago. While butchering the whale's body with a chainsaw, they found that he was carrying a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped bomb lance fragment (top) that was embedded 13 centimenters under the blubber in his neck, providing researchers with rare insight into this individual's age, which was estimated to be 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.
Scientists calculate a whale's age by chemically analyzing the amino acids in the animal's eye lenses. Individual amino acids accumulate structural changes in whales' eye lenses making them cloudier as they age. Experts mentioned that even though it's unusual to find a whale that is more than a century old, several bowheads have been found that were close to 200 years old. Based on what is known about the bomb lance fragment, this individual was estimated to be roughly 130 years old, so it would have been born in 1877.
The bomb lance fragment was lodged between bones in the whale's neck and shoulder blade. The fragment is comprised of a small metal cylinder filled with explosives and fitted with a time-delay fuse so it would explode several seconds after penetrating the whale. This exploding feature was meant to kill a whale and thereby prevent it from escaping. Instead, the device exploded and only injured the whale.
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