If you thought humans had cornered the market in living past the century mark, well…you must never have researched animals that live in the ocean.

Some of the longest lived creatures on Earth are whales, sharks, corals, tortoises, etc.

Scientists have long placed right whales lifespans on the lower side, around 60 years or so, but recent research shows they are capable of living to almost double that age in the wild.

To figure this out, researchers examined 40 years worth of photographic data following individuals in the Atlantic Ocean. Graphs showed the proportion of a population that survives to a given age (survivor curves), which is the best way to follow an unstable and/or threatened population.

The graphs revealed that the average lifespan of Southern right whales is 73.4 years, but that 10% of the population lives past 131.8 years.

The northern right whale, though, has a median life span of just 22.3 years, and 10% of the population living past 47.2 years old.

Study author Greg Breed released a statement speculating on the reason for the difference.

“This isn’t because of intrinsic differences in biology, and they should live much longer. They’re frequently tangled in fishing gear or struck by ships, and they suffer from starvation, potentially linked to environmental changes we don’t fully understand.”

Until now, the average lifespan of right whales was just an educated guess, as the hard data wasn’t available.

“We didn’t know how to age baleen whales until 1955, which was the very end of industrial whaling. By the time we figured it out, there weren’t many old whales left to study. So we just assumed they didn’t live that long.”

These researchers hope their findings will join a growing body of work that could help better inform conservation efforts in the future.

“To attain healthy populations that include old animals, recovery might take hundreds of years. For animals that live to be 100 or 150 and only give birth to a surviving calf every 10 years or so, slow recovery is expected.”

The whales are facing a future as uncertain as the rest of us.

But for 10% of them, they’ve got a good long time to see things turn around.

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