It has the largest mouth of any animal and uses its truck-sized curved head to batter through Arctic ice to surface from the depths.
And while swimming in freezing waters and smashing cranium-first up into ice sheets might not seem like the best way to guarantee longevity, such bone-chilling rough and tumble is no obstacle to the bowhead whale.
Like humpback whales, bowheads are known for their musical calls and are sometimes referred to as the jazz players of the ocean for their complex arrangements of ululations and bellows.
Today’s elderly bowhead crooners were likely singing the same songs around the time of the United States Civil War, the 1848 revolutions in Europe, or even the Congress of Vienna after Napoleon’s defeat.
With lifespans topping 200 years, the 20-metre-long, 80-90 tonne bowhead lives longer than any other mammal and seems to be as good as impervious to cancer.
According to a team of researchers led by Denis Firsanov and Max Zacher of the University of Rochester, the giant bowhead – sometimes called the Greenland right whale and the second-largest animal after the blue whale – has a cold-activated protein called CIRBP in its cells that protects its DNA from dangerous mutations.
Protein that repairs cells
Unlike with other animals, this protein “faithfully repairs” cells – a feat that may be contributing to the bowhead’s “exceptional longevity and low cancer incidence,” according to the team, whose work was published in the science journal Nature in October.
And while the researchers conceded that the exact mechanism by which the repair happens remains to be determined, their findings refute the contention that “DNA repair would be difficult or even impossible.”
“The bowhead whale provides evidence that this notion is incorrect,” the scientists said, suggesting that therapies based on replicating the processes seen in the whale “could one day enable the treatment of genome instability.”
“This could be especially important for patients with increased genetic predisposition for cancer, or more generally, for ageing populations at increased risk for developing cancer,” they asserted. – dpa
