Home | Category: Pinnipeds (Seals, Sea Lions, Walruses)
WALRUS CONSERVATION
There are an estimated 250,000 walruses (Odebenus rosmarus) in the world. Atlantic walruses (O. r. rosmarus) have been designated Near Threatened on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. There are around 25,000 of them Pacific walruses (O. r. divergens) are listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List. There are estimated to be over 200,000 of them. Walruses today are threatened by climate change and hunters who take them for their bones, skin, and tusks. According to the IUCN) there are regulations on walrus hunting in Canada, Greenland, and in the Russian Federation. Walruses are fully protected in Svalbard and the Russian Atlantic under the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission.
Population sizes of walruses decreased greatly in the 18th century due to overhunting. Atlantic walruses were nearly wiped out after centuries of slaughter by commercial ventures that harvested their blubber for oil and tusks for ivory. Through the years, governments from various countries have put restrictions on walrus hunting. This has allowed the populations to rebound but they have never fully recovered. Today Atlantic walruses number 10,000 to 50,000, numbers achieved with the helped of the United States Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. Inuit can legally hunt them, but are only allowed to make four kills a year. They are known for using walruses in a non-wasteful way. [Source: Hillary Baker, Animal Diversity Web (ADW) |=|]
Emily Sohn wrote in Hakai Magazine: Before the onset of industrial European walrus hunting in the 19th century, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of walruses swam freely throughout the Arctic. But the animals became so valued for their oil, meat, skin, and ivory that by the 1950s the population had fallen as low as 50,000. After a recovery that peaked in the 1980s, when there seemed to be more walruses than the environment could support, numbers declined again. Today, the best available data suggests that there may be as many as 25,000 Atlantic walruses and some 200,000 Pacific walruses. [Source: Emily Sohn, Hakai Magazine, Smithsonian.com, April 23, 2015]
But nobody knows for sure. Walruses spend a lot of time underwater, diving for shellfish on the seafloor. And they tend to clump within an enormous range that is both inaccessible and inhospitable to people, which means that extrapolating the size of an entire population by surveying a fraction of the environment can lead to wild miscalculations. The last attempt to make an aerial count of Pacific walruses, in 2006, came up with an estimate of 129,000 individuals, but error margins were huge. The possible range was between 55,000 and 507,000.
“They’re the gypsies of the sea and they’re a very challenging species to study,” says Rebecca Taylor, a research statistician with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Alaska Science Center in Anchorage. “If you find walruses, you often find a lot of walruses. But you can go a long time at sea without finding any walruses. The logistics of getting out there and observing them are very challenging.”Among the variety of scientific endeavors aiming to learn, once and for all, how walruses are faring, researchers at the USGS are tagging animals to track their movements and using statistical analyses to understand population trends. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) is studying biopsies and DNA sequences to try and get the first accurate count of Pacific walruses. Results, as they emerge, will help focus conservation efforts where they’re needed most.
See Separate Article: WALRUSES: CHARACTERISTICS, TUSKS, DIET, BEHAVIOR, REPRODUCTION factsanddetails.com
Walruses and Climate Change
Climate change is viewed as a threat to walruses. There is a decrease of floating ice further out at sea, which reduces their feeding areas. Many aspects of the walrus’s life cycle depend directly on the species’ sea ice habitat. As such, the ongoing and anticipated reductions in the extent and timing of ice cover stemming from climate change poses a significant threat to them. If a large amount of ice habitat is lost, walruses will be negatively impacted during calving and rearing of young. Insufficient ice may result in poor calf conditions and higher mortality rates.
Scientists are studying the movement and foraging habits of walruses forced to shore by sea ice that has melted far beyond the relatively shallow outer continental shelf where they like to feed. Walruses cannot swim indefinitely. Many walruses, especially females with young, use sea ice as a platform most of the summer to dive for clams and other sea bottom creatures. [Source: Dan Joling, Associated Press, October 1, 2009]
According to Smithsonian.com: As their icy hunting grounds melt faster and faster, Pacific walruses are retreating to dry ground earlier than ever. Arctic sea ice continues its troubling decline year after year. On average the Arctic's sea ice maximum extent has dropped by roughly 2.8 percent every decade since measurements began in 1979, according to NASA.[Source: Ben Panko, Smithsonian.com, August 21, 2017]
Emily Sohn wrote in Hakai Magazine: As Arctic sea ice melts at a worrisome rate — in 2015 reaching the smallest maximum extent ever recorded — walruses are behaving strangely in parts of their range. That includes gathering in unusually large numbers on land.Normally, females and calves prefer to haul out on sea ice instead of on land with the males. But as the ice disappears, the beaches are filling up. In September 2014, 35,000 Pacific walruses piled together near the village of Point Lay, Alaska, making international headlines for a record-setting heap of jostling tusks and whiskers on American soil. In October 2010, 120,000 walruses — perhaps half the world’s population — crowded onto one Russian haul-out site. [Source: Emily Sohn, Hakai Magazine, Smithsonian.com, April 23, 2015]
But while hauling out on land appears to be normal behavior for walruses, it’s the staggering size of recent gatherings that is cause for concern. This new behavior suggests that the places walruses gather are limited. With less sea ice for walruses to rest on. Erica Hill, an anthropologist at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau suspects that the beaches are only going to become more overcrowded. “It’s not a matter of walruses going someplace else to haul out,’” she says, adding that walruses return repeatedly to the same haul-out locations for generations. “Because they have specific requirements for their [haul-out sites], they can’t just move elsewhere. There is no other place.”
“We can definitively say they’ve altered their behavior in an unprecedented way,” USGS wildlife biologist Anthony Fischbach told Hakai Magazine. “We can report that they have a different energy budget, that they’re spending less time resting and more time in the water burning calories. And that leads us to think that is not a good thing. But integrating that into what it’s going to be like in the future, whether they will do fine or not, that is an open question. There is more science to do.”
Walruses and Humans
Walruses have been hunted by humans and used for oil, ivory, and their hides. For many centuries, indigenous people of Alaska, Canada, and Russia hunted them for their meat and bones, which were used to make tools and other things. [Source: Hillary Baker, Animal Diversity Web (ADW) |=|]
Inuit (Eskimos) have hunted walruses for centuries, using nearly every part of the animal for some purpose: hides for boats, blubber for food, whiskers for toothpicks. During the 19th and 20th century the walruses were slaughtered for their ivory and the oil in their blubber. The animals were easy prey for hunters and their numbers were greatly reduced. Walrus numbers rebounded have increased dramatically since then.☺
The Russians have harvested walrus meat primarily to feed animals on fur farms. Walrus meat is tough and coarse-textured but is tasty and lean. Trappers once used walrus hide as rope, no other animal hide is as strong they say. Walruses are sometimes hunted illegally. A pair walrus tusks can bring in as much as $1,000.
In May 2019, photos believed to be from 2006 surfaced online that showed a large walrus napping on top of a Russian submarine. Walruses can be very smelly and snore loudly. It has been said that the scents of walruses makes humans wish they were congested with a head cold. One fisherman told journalist Gordon Young in the 1970s, "A few years ago I wintered over on one of the small islands near Svabard. Suddenly heard what I thought was an airplane. I grabbed my lantern and rushed outside-it turned out to be a big bull walrus, sleeping on a passing ice floe. By hell that walrus sure could snore." [Source: Gordon Young, National Geographic, August 1978]
Walruses and the Inuit (Eskimos)
Inuit culture is closely toed to the walrus, which provided them, food as well as hides and bones for clothing, shelter, tools and weapons. Hunters that kill walruses in the summer cut out the stomach and bury them, digging them up in the winter and feasting on the frozen meat and blubber as a delicacy
Emily Sohn wrote in Hakai Magazine: For at least 2,000 years, people have relied on walrus for food for themselves and their dogs,says Erica Hill, an anthropologist at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau. Her research also shows that native communities have long built their villages near haul-out sites that have remained in the same areas for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.[Source: Emily Sohn, Hakai Magazine, Smithsonian.com, April 23, 2015]
walrus hunting in 1999
Further scrutiny of the deep past offers insight into how, for many indigenous communities, animals are woven into the fabric of life. Early hunters used walrus bones, teeth, tusks, and skin, for instance, to fashion sled runners, ornaments, and sails. Scapulae became shovel blades, penis bones became harpoon sockets, intestines were stretched into skylights, and skulls formed the structural foundation of walls for homes. In Iñupiaq, a language spoken in northern Alaska, 15 words exist to describe a walrus’s position relative to a fishing boat, including samna, “that one on the southern side.” Walruses are also ingrained in Inuit religion. “There is an idea people still talk about today,” says archaeologist Sean Desjardins of McGill University in Montreal, “that the Northern Lights are actually spirits playing a ball game with a walrus head.”
Traditional knowledge prioritizes relationships between people and animals. In the Inuit view, walruses have a sense of personhood and agency, says Hill. They act and react. Kunuk, a walrus hunter and filmamker points out that animal populations — caribou, fish, seals, and walruses — have always cycled. Unlike scientists, the Inuit feel it’s best not to talk about how many come by each year. The animals might overhear, feel disrespected, and choose to stay away.“If we talk about the walrus too much, they’re going to change,” says Kunuk. “If we were farmers we would count our stock. But we’re hunters and these are wild animals.”
Inuit Walrus Hunt
Emily Sohn wrote in Hakai Magazine: It’s 1980, late July — the month walrus hunters climb into motorized freighter canoes and leave Igloolik, a small Inuit community in Nunavut, Canada. Every summer since he was a boy, filmaker Kunuk has watched the hunters return, weary but triumphant with walrus meat. He’s always wondered how far these men travel to reach the floating rafts of ice where walruses rest during the summer. And he’s pondered how just a few men can possibly kill a creature that might weigh more than 20 men and then wrestle it into a canoe. [Source: Emily Sohn, Hakai Magazine, Smithsonian.com, April 23, 2015]
The temperature on an Arctic summer day rarely exceeds 10°C, with much cooler air out by the sea ice, so the hunters dress for the climate: skin boots, mittens, and knee-length parkas with fur-lined hoods. Kunuk joins an experienced elder and the man’s brother as they load their boat with harpoons, guns, knives, tea, and bannock (a fry bread). Nearby, other men ready their own freighter canoes.
Painting of a walrus hunt by Westerners in 1866
Then they push off — a tiny flotilla in a great big sea — on their way to hunt an enormous animal. As they travel, the hunters explain how to read the angle of the sun, the direction of the currents, and the subtle movements of the seaweed — a navigational system so baffling to young Kunuk that he silently questions how they will ever find their way home. After several hours spent listening to the engine’s mechanical chug, Kunuk hears a chorus of mumbling and chattering, grunts and growls, a sign that they are close to the walruses. (That sound will later remind him of the cacophony in a busy bar). They shut down the motors and drift toward the ice. As the walruses lift their hefty heads, the hunters raise their rifles and aim...Some passengers cover their ears when a rifle fires. Soon, the hunters are chewing on raw meat as they slice through blubber, then bundle meat
Throughout the Arctic, the traditional walrus hunt happens today much like it has for thousands of years — in teams armed with knowledge about walrus behavior accumulated over generations. But times are changing, and it’s not just that the hunters now have global positioning systems, speedboats, and cell phones. On that first expedition some three decades ago, young Kunuk watched and filmed as the hunters shot and butchered walruses, then wrapped parcels of meat in walrus skin. When they returned to Igloolik, the men dug pits for the meat in the gravel beach. After fermenting for several months, the aged meat, called igunaq, takes on the consistency of blue cheese and smells like a week-old carcass, Kunuk says. Yet once acquired, a taste for this valuable delicacy is a lifelong love, and, along with fresh, boiled walrus meat, is coveted.
Earliest Known Walrus Hunting — Off Russia in 1000 B.C.
Walrus Hunting is not something that is done lightly and without preparation. It requires numerous individuals, boats large enough to carry people and equipment and weapons and technology able to kill walruses. Killing a walrus is no easy task. After it is killed you have to bring it back to shore somehow. That usually entails dragging the walrus or cutting it into manageable-sized pieces.
In 2007, scientists found evidence of walrus hunting that goes back to 1000 B.C.. According to Current World Archaeology Members of a Russian-American team investigating the early history of whaling have made a spectacular find at Un’en’en, near the modern whaling village of Nunligran, on Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula, the most northeastern part of Russia. Right at the end of their 2007 season they uncovered an ivory carving, approximately half a meter in length, engraved with scenes of men in umiaks (wooden framed boats covered in seal or walrus hide) harpooning whales. The carving was found sealed by the roof timbers of a collapsed structure that has been carbon dated to 1,000 B.C. [Source:Current World Archaeology, May 6, 2008]
The images on the carving suggest that methods of boat building and hunting for whales and walruses had changed little over three millennia. For the coastal Chukchi and Yupik Eskimo people of the peninsula, located in the northeastern corner of Russia’s Far East, on the opposite side of the Bering Strait from Alaska, subsistence whaling remains an important source of food today.
Archaeologists also found tools for hunting and butchering on a site that was originally discovered by Sergey Gusev, of the Institute for Heritage in Moscow, the Russian Co-Director of the project, in 2003. The US Co-Director, Daniel Odess of the University of Alaska Museum of the North, said ‘The importance of whaling in Arctic prehistory is now becoming clear. Prehistoric settlements were situated and defended specifically so that people could hunt whales’.
Scientists discovered worked whale bones and heavy lance blades suitable for killing whales. They also found carved walrus tusks with images of men pursuing whales in vessels that look like sealskin boats called umiaks still made today. Other images show tents, men hunting polar bears with bows and arrows and a man stabbing a dog-like animal in the back.
Walrus Attacks
Walruses occasionally kill people. The scent of humans makes walruses panicky. In September 2019 a small Russian navy boat, carrying scientists with the Russian Geographical Society, was attacked and sunk by a walrus in the Arctic. No one was hurt as passengers on the boat were able to get to shore, the Barents Observer reported. According to Business Insider: “The Altai, a tugboat of the Russian navy's Northern Fleet, sailed to the Franz Josef Land archipelago in the Arctic carrying the researchers. “"The polar latitudes are fraught with many dangers," the the Russian Geographical Society posted. [Source: Ryan Pickrell, Business Insider, September 24, 2019]
“To get ashore from the Altai, the researchers and other expedition participants had to rely on smaller landing craft. During one landing, the "group of researchers had to flee from a female walrus, which, while protecting its cubs, attacked an expedition boat," the Northern Fleet said. “The navy added that "serious troubles were avoided thanks to the clear and well-coordinated actions of the Northern Fleet servicemembers, who were able to take the boat away from the animals without harming them." The Barents Observer reports that a drone was being operated in close proximity to the walruses. It is unclear if this is what triggered the aggression.
While the Russian military makes no mention of any equipment losses, the Geographical Society had a bit more to say on what happened. “"Walruses attacked the participating boat. ," the research group explained. "The boat sank, but the tragedy was avoided thanks to the clear actions of the squad leader. All the landing participants safely reached the shore." This wasn't the Russian navy's first run-in with walruses.
Polar Bears, Humans and Walruses
Emily Sohn wrote in Hakai Magazine: For a 700-kilogram polar bear, calorie-dense walrus is also fair game and, in the emerging quagmire of changing Arctic dynamics, this is the crux. As Arctic ice melts, polar bears are spending more time on land where they’re smelling hard-won igunaq, digging up the meat, and occasionally wandering into Igloolik or other villages. A generation ago, Kunuk’s father told him that one bear a year might come into the village. But between August 2012 and January 2013, over 30 bears were seen on Igloolik Island, including in and around Igloolik village. [Source: Emily Sohn, Hakai Magazine, Smithsonian.com, April 23, 2015]
Along the coasts of Alaska and Russia, another temptation lures polar bears closer to villages: extra-large gatherings of live walruses that are, like the bears, increasingly driven to shore, largely because of the lack of sea ice. Walruses are notoriously skittish and often stampede when spooked by something like a bear. In a stampede’s wake, they leave trampled animals, sometimes thousands of them. It’s like a free buffet for hungry bears.
Escalating conflicts between walruses, polar bears, and humans have prompted a new era of adaptation by indigenous communities, often with scientists supporting their efforts. In Igloolik and nearby Hall Beach, hunters are testing electric fences as deterrents to protect igunaq. Sometimes the bears get over or under the fences, but several years into the project, they have learned to avoid the live wires, which deliver a harmless but effective jolt. And communities are losing less of their valuable meat, especially when they’re vigilant about checking the fences, says Marcus Dyck, a polar bear biologist with the government of Nunavut. “I’ve seen polar bears move a thousand pounds of rocks to get at walrus meat. If a bear is determined, there’s nothing that can stop [it],” he says. “Surprisingly, electricity from the fences really spooks the shit out of them.”
On the Pacific side of the Arctic, efforts to manage the walrus situation began in 2006 after a polar bear killed a teenage girl in the Russian village of Riyrkaipiy. Along with a growing sense that more polar bears were hanging around on land, the concerned villagers took charge by restricting disturbances at haul-out sites and creating umky (polar bear) patrols to chase bears away with flares, pots and pans, and rubber bullets. Their work was so effective that at least seven communities now have active polar-bear patrol teams that keep watch along the northern coastline of Russia. In Alaska, communities are managing walrus stampedes in terrestrial haul-out sites — and thus deterring bears — by minimizing noise and other human-caused disturbances. Low-flying planes are diverted, film crews turned away, and hunting is avoided in an attempt to keep the herds calm.
Walrus Mass Gatherings
On Round Island in Alaska and Big Diomede Island and three beaches on the Siberian coast in Russia, thousands of male walruses gather from the spring to fall while females are raising their young on the ice. Around 12,000 gather on the beaches of Round Island alone. Describing the mass of male walruses on Round Island, Richard Mathews wrote in Smithsonian magazine, "Wine-sack bodies slump in all conceivable positions, long white tusks protruding the mass in every conceivable direction..Most lie torpid, eyes closed silent, unbothered by flies and feces coating their extravagant flanks. Others jockey for position, wallow seaward right over fellows amidst a cacophony of snorts and clicks as jabbing tusks meet." Walruses that suddenly find them in a relatively walrus-free area on the beach generally try and move towards the other walruses.
In 2017, the gathering of around 2,000 walruses on the shores near Point Lay — a small, Iñupiaq community on the northwest coast of Alaska — took place earlier than ever before observed. Ben Panko wrote in Smithsonian.com: These walruses usually rest atop floating ice sheets to recuperate between dives in the Chukchi Sea while on the hunt for their favorite foods, which include clams, worms and other small ocean critters. But when ice isn't available — as has increasingly been the case in the Arctic — the creatures head to land, reports Jerzy Shedlock of the Alaska Dispatch News. [Source: Ben Panko, Smithsonian.com, August 21, 2017]
Such land haulouts aren't particularly unusual for Point Lay, the FWS notes in a Q&A about the event. What is unusual is the shifting timing and frequency over the years. Data from the past two centuries suggest that the site was used irregularly by walruses in the mid-20th century, Camila Domonoske reported for NPR last year. But in the last decade, walruses have been gathering with increasing frequency at Point Lay. And these gatherings show no sign of slowing down. As Shedlock writes, Arctic sea ice extent this past July dipped to the fifth-lowest extent for that month yet measured.
Walrus Mass Deaths
In August 1996, 70 two-ton bull walrus, for some unexplained reason, climbed up a hill on an Alaskan beach and waddled off the edge of a cliff and fell 100 feet to their deaths. Scientist managed to turn back 150 bulls. Offering one theory for the strange behavior a scientist told Newsweek, "It's real herd response, just like with caribou or lemmings. Once the first one falls, it is too late for the second or third or forth to turn around." In 1994, 42 walrus died. In 1995, 17 died under similar circumstances. The walrus climbed a hill to escape a storm. Once one started climbing the other followed. Most slide down some grass and fell over a small cliff to their deaths.
An estimated 3,500 walruses were spotted on September 12, 2009, at Icy Cape, Alaska. Two days later, 131 mostly young animals were found dead, likely trampled to death. Biologists say the walruses were likely killed by a stampede caused by a a polar bear, human hunter, low flying airplane or other disturbance. According to Associated Press: Most of the dead animals were found at Icy Cape, though a few also were found near the village of Wainwright to the north and locations up to 26 miles to the south. All appeared to be calves or yearlings. Veterinarians and biologists from the Fish and Wildlife Service, USGS, the Alaska SeaLife Center and the North Slope Borough examined 71 carcasses and performed nine detailed necropsies. Of the 71 carcasses examined, three were female yearlings, 25 were female calves and 43 were male calves, according to their preliminary report.
"All of the necropsied animals showed similar abnormalities, primarily extensive bruising in muscles in the neck and chest," the report said. "One animal had a fractured skull, and one animal had separation of some ribs from the backbone. Most of the animals had blood coming from the nostrils. The blood coming from the nostrils indicated damage to the neck, head, nose, or internal organs." The extensive bruising and the age of the animals indicated cause of death likely was trampling. Investigators found no evidence of hunting or other recent human activities near the carcasses. Several carcasses had been scavenged by polar or grizzly bears but investigators could not say whether bears were responsible for frightening the walruses and creating "disturbances." "Exhaustion and separation from mothers may have also contributed to the death of some animals." After the carcasses were spotted, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the North Slope Borough surveyed the entire Chukchi Sea coast from Barrow to Cape Sabine. About 1,000 walruses was spotted on a barrier island northwest of Point Lay but no other dead animals were seen.
Starving Walrus Calves Abandoned in the Open Sea Blamed on Climate Change
In 2006, there were reports of walrus pups left to drown or starve. Roger Highfield wrote in The Telegraph: An unprecedented number of unaccompanied walrus calves have been sighted in the Arctic Ocean, where melting sea ice may be forcing mothers to abandon their pups to follow the rapidly retreating ice. Lone walrus calves so far from shore have not been seen before, researchers report in the April 2006 issue of Aquatic Mammals. The sightings suggest that increased polar warming may lead to decreases in the walrus population. The US Coast Guard icebreaker Healy reported nine walrus calves swimming in deep waters far from shore in the Canada Basin. Unable to forage for themselves, the calves were likely to drown or starve, the scientists said. "We were on a station for 24 hours and the calves would be swimming around us crying," said Carin Ashjian, a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts, and a member of the research team. " We could not rescue them." [Source: Roger Highfield, The Telegraph, April 15, 2006]
The young depend on their mothers' milk for up to two years. "The young can't forage for themselves," Mr Ashjian said. The researchers found evidence of warmer ocean temperatures that may have melted seasonal sea ice over the shallow continental shelf where walruses dive for food such as clams and crabs. Sea ice normally forms over the continental shelf north of Alaska and persists even in summer. But the researchers found water as warm as 7°C on parts of the shelf from the Bering Sea to the south, more than six degrees higher than temperatures at the same time two years earlier.
The warmer water apparently caused sea ice to melt rapidly over the shallow continental shelf and retreat to colder deep water over the Arctic Ocean basins. When ice retreats to deep water there are no platforms in shallow waters for mothers to rest and to leave their calves while they feed, and the pairs become separated. "If walruses and other ice-associated marine mammals cannot adapt to caring for their young in shallow waters without sea-ice available as a resting platform between dives to the sea floor, a significant Population: decline of this species could occur," said the team led by Lee Cooper, of the University of Tennessee.
35,000 Walruses on a Beach in Northwest Alaska Attributed to Climate Change
In September 2014, 35,000 walrus gathered on shore near Point Lay, Alaska. Associated Press reported: Pacific walrus that can’t find sea ice for resting in Arctic waters are coming ashore in record numbers on a beach in northwest Alaska. An estimated 35,000 walrus were photographed about five miles north of Point Lay, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Point Lay is an Inupiat Eskimo village 300 miles southwest of Barrow and 700 miles northwest of Anchorage. [Source: Associated Press, October 1, 2014]
The enormous gathering was spotted during NOAA’s annual Arctic marine mammal aerial survey, spokeswoman Julie Speegle said. The survey is conducted with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Andrea Medeiros, spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said walrus were first spotted Sept. 13 and have been moving on and off shore. Observers last week saw about 50 carcasses on the beach from animals that may have been killed in a stampede, and the agency was assembly a necropsy team to determine their cause of death.
The gathering of walrus on shore is a phenomenon that has accompanied the loss of summer sea ice as the climate has warmed. Pacific walrus spend winters in the Bering Sea. Females give birth on sea ice and use ice as a diving platform to reach snails, clams and worms on the shallow continental shelf. Unlike seals, walrus cannot swim indefinitely and must rest. They use their tusks to “haul out,” or pull themselves onto ice or rocks. As temperatures warm in summer, the edge of the sea ice recedes north. Females and their young ride the edge of the sea ice into the Chukchi Sea, the body of water north of the Bering Strait. In recent years, sea ice has receded north beyond shallow continental shelf waters and into Arctic Ocean water, where depths exceed two miles and walrus cannot dive to the bottom.
The sea ice’s annual low point in 2014 was the sixth smallest since satellite monitoring began in 1979. Walruses in large numbers were first spotted on the U.S. side of the Chukchi Sea in 2007. They returned in 2009, and in 2011, scientists estimated 30,000 walruses along one kilometer of beach near Point Lay. The World Wildlife Fund said walrus have also been gathering in large groups on the Russian side of the Chukchi Sea.
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: Animal Diversity Web animaldiversity.org ; National Geographic, Live Science, Natural History magazine, David Attenborough books, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Discover magazine, The New Yorker, Time, BBC, CNN, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Wikipedia, The Guardian, Top Secret Animal Attack Files website and various books and other publications.
Last updated June 2025