In this paper, exponentially aggressive preservation of nearly depleted nodes is employed to discourage a node with considerably low residual energy from being selected as a routing node in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Simulation model shows that geographical and energy aware routing (GEAR) with dynamically adaptive transmission power (DATP) and exponentially aggressive preservation of nearly depleted nodes can send over 65% more packets than the GEAR for both uniform and non-uniform traffic regardless of network size. The exponentially aggressive preservation of nearly depleted node can be applied to various existing energy aware routing protocols to potentially extend the life-spans of WSNs