Walruses! These giant, bushy-‘stached, improbable creatures with those enormous canine tusks erupting from within their fleshy mouths have always intrigued me. They especially captured my attention when Fridtjof Nansen wrote about various walrus encounters in Farthest North around the same time I learned I was joining a small group in the Arctic waters of Svalbard in June 2020 (a trip which required waiting until 2022 to take, thanks to Covid...).

I wondered if we would see any walruses while we navigated the waters around Svalbard. On day seven, we entered Forlandsund fjord, and there on a long sandy spit was a herd of maybe 40 walruses. What a bonus on a trip geared to finding polar bears!

We stayed an hour or so, thrilled by the chance to observe the group. Known as a sociable species, many were lying huddled together cozily like so many oversized potatoes on the beach. Others were coming and going to the nearby water off both sides of the spit to swim, wrestle, cavort, eat, and do whatever else walruses do on a typical day. And some were curious about us, edging close enough to Rinie that he could hear the walrus breathe (nevermind the rifle slung on his shoulder—this and a flare gun are routine tools in polar bear country).

The walrus is scientifically known as a pinniped, or fin-footed mammal. It is around 7-12 feet long, and related to seals and sea lions. Although they are peripatetic, they do not venture far from coastal waters since they need shallow places to feed mostly on invertebrates. Although they can swim to a depth of around 300 feet, on average they rarely go much deeper than 65-100 feet. [Source: www.arcticwwf.org/wildlife/walrus/] To me, it is amazing that such a sizeable animal has a diet mostly centered upon clams, molluscs, worms, snails, soft shell crabs, shrimp and sea cucumbers from shallow sea floors. Yummy. The purpose of the bristly moustaches is to nuzzle the sea floor, feeling for that next delectable bite.

The Latin name for the walrus (Odobenus rosmarus) translates as “tooth-walking sea horse.” Although they just use their flippers to waddle around on sandy beaches, they use the tusks to haul their not-inconsiderable bulk up onto the ice (they range from 800 to 4,000 pounds, of which up to 25 percent is blubber!).

They also use the tusks to defend themselves when during sexual forays and against predators (nowadays, essentially, killer whales and polar bears). Walruses were protected from humans through a hunting ban by the Norwegian government in 1952. (They are still hunted elsewhere). By then, the walrus population in Norway was only about 100, and rebounding has been slow. According to a 2022 article in Polar Journal, there were only 741 walruses counted in 1993. [Source: polarjournal.ch/en/2022/04/07/hunting-ban-helped-the-walrus-on-svalbard, accessed July 12, 2022]

To count migratory animals is, of course, challenging. Happily another source reported that there are about 25,000 walruses in the Atlantic, approximately 200,000 in the Pacific, and around 5,000 in the Laptev Sea north of Russia. Their status is being watched carefully by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (est. 1964), but walrus are on their Red List of Threatened Species. According to them, walrus are categorized as “vulnerable” nowadays, mostly due to climate change. Happily, in addition to those we saw at the beach that day, we saw others later looking quite content on ice floes at the north end of Svalbard.

Want to hear the sounds a walrus makes? Try the YouTube link here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAVL61yeCYs which introduces E.T., a 31-year-old Pacific walrus at Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium in Tacoma, Washington. He weighs over 3,400 lbs and is one of only 17 walruses in U.S. zoos and aquariums. E.T. came to the Zoo as an orphan from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and I do not know why he does not have tusks.

If you’d like to learn more about the exploration of the Arctic, I recommend Nansen’s account of his 1893-1896 expedition. Included is some eyebrow-raising information about walruses! Stand warned: it is long (544 pages), but as reported by Google Books, “This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.” Go ahead: “visit” the Arctic from the comfort of your armchair! Enjoy.