How long does a sperm whale live for?

Question

How long does a sperm whale live for?

Answer 1

Ha ha, you said sperm... whale.

Answer 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_Whale

Sperm whales live for 50 years and possibly more.

http://marinebio.org/species.asp?id=190

Maximum known life span is 77 years.

Answer 3

The answer is that we're not so sure any more.  The reason for this is that our centuries-old method of determining dead whales' ages may not be nearly as accurate as previously thought.

All cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) lack external ear openings, but their ears still secrete wax.  Since it has no way to get out, it stays there in a ball that slowly grows larger and larger with time.  If you cut one of those balls in half, you see rings, like a branch cut in half, so everybody just assumed one ring per year, and for the longest time, nobody thought to actually check it out.  Everybody just assumed that they were caused by seasonal differences in temperature and/or diet.

The trouble with this notion is that captive dolphins that don't experience those seasonal variations also have rings in their ear wax, and those rings don't always always agree with the known age of the animal at death.  Trees stay in one place, so their rings accurately reflect conditions in that location.  Cetaceans move constantly, so their rings could only be a record of conditions where they happened to be, if they are environmentally influenced at all.  

Besides, the giant sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) spends very little of its time at or near the surface (the only place it could be influenced by climate change) and it eats giant squid year-round, so those environmental factors may not be involved at all.  The truth is that we still don't know what causes the changes in whale ear wax as the ball forms.

Answer 4

till it dies