Balaena

About Balaena

Balaena contains one living species, and it is the only baleen whale that spends its entire life in Arctic and subarctic water. The skull is enormous and triangular in profile, up to two-fifths of body length, and strong enough to break upward through sea ice to breathe. Blubber reaches half a metre in thickness, the most of any animal, and the baleen plates are the longest of any whale.

Its longevity is exceptional even by the standards of large whales. Stone and ivory harpoon points of a kind last used in the nineteenth century have been recovered from living animals, and racemisation dating of eye lens proteins has returned ages well over two hundred years. The species’ genome, sequenced in 2015, carries distinctive variants in DNA repair and cell-cycle genes that are now studied for what they say about ageing generally.