Helene Marsh stood in front of a hotel conference room filled with other marine mammal researchers. It was December 1981, and the Australian scientist had spent years working with her mentor, Toshio Kasuya of the University of Tokyo, studying reproduction in short-finned pilot whales: dark, round-headed animals about the length of a pickup truck. She had big news. At the time, scientists thought that wild animals did not live beyond their reproductive years. But Marsh and Kasuya had been studying samples collected from some 300 short-finned pilot whales: Marsh had…
