There's a moment that happens when you see a walrus for the first time. Not in a picture in real life. Your brain does this little stutter-step, like it's trying to process what your eyes are telling it and keeps coming back with error. does not compute.
Because walruses are.a lot.
They're enormous and wrinkled and have teeth growing out of their face in a way that suggests someone lost the instruction manual halfway through assembly. They smell like fish and wet dog and regret. They make sounds that range from angry plumbing to ghost in a synthesizer. And yet, when you actually spend time observing them, something shifts. You start to realize that these bizarre, blubbery giants are living their absolute best lives, and frankly, they might be onto something the rest of us missed.
When God Made the Walrus, He Was Definitely Winging It
Let's be brutally honest about walrus aesthetics. If animals had yearbook superlatives, Most Likely to Be Mistaken for a Pile of Laundry would go to the walrus every single time.
They've got the body of a bean bag chair that's been overstuffed and left out in the rain. Their skin doesn't so much cover their body as drape over it apologetically, creating rolls and folds in places you didn't know could have rolls and folds. They're colored in shades that paint companies would call Sad Taupe or Existential Gray, though they can flush to a sunburned pink that makes them look like they've been hitting the sauce too hard.
And those tusks. Sweet mercy, those tusks.
These aren't dainty little decorative points. These are full on ivory sabers that can grow to three feet long, jutting from their upper jaw at angles that seem both aggressive and deeply inconvenient. Imagine trying to eat soup with two massive stilts sticking out of your mouth. Now imagine that this is just. your face. Forever.
But here's what gets me: Walruses have zero self consciousness about any of this. A walrus has never once looked in a reflective ice puddle and thought, Maybe I should do something about these tusks. A walrus has never sucked in its gut when another walrus swam by. They just ARE, fully and completely, without apology or explanation.
That's some next level confidence.
The Whisker Situation Requires Its Own Paragraph
We need to discuss the mustache, because calling it a mustache is like calling the Grand Canyon a ditch.
A walrus has between 400 and 700 mystacial vibrissae which is the scientific term for face whiskers that are doing some serious heavy lifting. These aren't the cute little whiskers you see on a cat. These are thick, stiff bristles arranged in rows that make the walrus look like it's cosplaying as a Victorian sea captain who takes himself very seriously.
But function over form, right? Those whiskers are so sensitive they can detect a clam buried in mud from several inches away, in complete darkness, through several layers of sediment. Each whisker has its own blood supply and nerve bundle. They're essentially fingers growing out of the walrus's face blind fingers that can read texture, shape, and movement with absurd precision.
Here's what that means in practice. A walrus descends to the ocean floor where it's darker than your soul at 3 AM on a Monday. The water pressure is crushing. The temperature would freeze your eyeballs. And the walrus just. starts sweeping its face across the seafloor like a living metal detector, finding clams with a success rate that would make professional treasure hunters weep with envy.
When it finds a clam and it always finds the clam it jets water from its mouth to blast away the mud, then creates a vacuum seal with its lips and sucks the meat right out of the shell with enough force to. actually, I don't want to think too hard about the physics of walrus suction. Let's just say it's impressive and leave it there.
Six thousand clams per feeding session. Six. Thousand. That's not a meal. that's a personal vendetta against shellfish.
The Social Contract of Being Huge and Awkward Together
If you've ever been to a crowded subway car, a packed elevator, or a sold out concert, you know that uncomfortable feeling of being pressed against strangers while pretending everything is totally fine and normal. Your personal space has been violated. Theirs has too. Everyone's just trying to get through this without making it weird.
Now imagine that scenario, except there are ten thousand of you, you're all shaped like water balloons filled with pudding, you weigh two tons apiece, you're lying on rocks or ice, and you're all just. fine with it.
That's a walrus haul out.
Walruses are intensely social animals who have somehow figured out how to exist in extremely close quarters without descending into complete chaos. Sure, there are occasional disagreements. Tusks get brandished. Someone gets too pushy and receives a jab. There's grumbling and bellowing and the occasional full-blown shoving match. But considering the density and the fact that everyone's armed with literal face spears, it's remarkable how well they coexist.
There's a hierarchy, of course. Bigger tusks generally mean higher status, especially among males. Bulls will display their tusks to each other in what can only be described as aggressive comparison the walrus version of mine's bigger than yours. Sometimes this escalates. Two males will rear up, interlock tusks, and push against each other while making sounds that suggest they're both equally committed to and annoyed by this whole process.
But most of the time? They're just. there. Together. Piled up like cordwood with mustaches. Sleeping, resting, occasionally shifting position, letting out the occasional snort or grunt that might mean excuse me or watch it, buddy or possibly just I exist and everyone should know about it.
Motherhood: The Walrus Edition
If you want to see the tender side of these blubbery behemoths, watch a mother with her calf.
Female walruses give birth to a single calf after a pregnancy that lasts about 15 monthswhich is already a commitment that deserves respect. That calf will stay with mom for up to three years, nursing, learning, and being protected with a ferocity that makes mama bears look like casual babysitters.
A mother walrus is constantly vocalizing to her baby. It's a mix of grunts, barks, whistles, and bellows that probably translate to the universal language of mothers everywhere. Stay close. Don't wander off. Yes, I see you. You're doing great. BE CAREFUL.
In crowded haul outs with thousands of walruses, a mother can identify her specific calf by voice alone. Her baby knows her call instantly. It's like having a dedicated phone line in the middle of the world's loudest, smelliest party.
And the protection? A mother walrus will take on a polar bear without hesitation. She'll place herself between her calf and any perceived threat other walruses, boats, humans, anything and make it abundantly clear that going through her is not an option anyone should consider seriously.
The calf, meanwhile, rides on mom's back in the water, nurses for nearly two years, and gradually learns the skills it needs. how to find food, how to navigate social situations, how to use those growing tusks, when to haul out, when to dive. It's an extended apprenticeship in being a walrus, taught by the one walrus who will never give up on you.
It's genuinely beautiful in a way that catches you off guard when you remember we're talking about animals that look like animated sandbags with dental problems.
The Love Songs of Awkward Giants
Male walruses during breeding season become underwater musicians, which sounds romantic until you actually hear what they're producing.
These "songs" are not melodious. They're not soothing. They're mechanical, repetitive sequences of knocks, bells, clicks, and whistles that sound like someone's trying to communicate via haunted plumbing. A male can keep this up for hours, floating vertically in the water with his inflated throat sacs keeping him upright, broadcasting his availability and quality to any females in the area.
Does it work? Apparently yes, which tells you something important about walrus attraction standards: It's not about being smooth or beautiful. It's about being persistent, loud, and unashamed to make weird noises in public for extended periods.
Honestly? Kind of inspiring.
The sounds serve multiple purposes attracting females, yes, but also establishing territory and warning off other males. It's a whole underwater conversation happening in a language that sounds like industrial machinery having an existential crisis.
And here's the thing. They're not just mindlessly making noise. Studies suggest these vocalizations have structure, variation, and individual signatures. Each male has his own style, his own repertoire. It's creative expression meets biological imperative, performed by a two ton animal with face tusks in the freezing Arctic Ocean.
Nature is weird, man.
The Problem We Created
Okay, we need to have the uncomfortable conversation now.
Walruses have been doing their thing the hauling out, the clam vacuuming, the awkward socializing, the terrible singing for about 17 million years. They've survived ice ages, climate shifts, and even extensive human hunting. They've proven themselves to be tough, adaptable, and remarkably resilient.
But they're not built for the speed of change we're throwing at them now.
Walruses depend on sea ice. Not as a nice-to-have, but as a fundamental part of their survival strategy. They rest on ice between feeding dives. They use it as a mobile platform to access rich feeding areas. They give birth on it. Their entire annual migration follows the advance and retreat of sea ice.
That ice is disappearing. Fast.
Arctic sea ice is declining at roughly 13% per decade. Summer ice that used to be reliable is now absent or distant. And walruses are being forced to make impossible choices.
Instead of small haul outs on ice, we're now seeing massive aggregations on land 30,000, 40,000, sometimes 50,000 animals crammed onto beaches that historically held a few hundred. The overcrowding leads to stampedes triggered by planes, boats, or polar bears. Calves get crushed. Weak or injured animals get trampled. It's chaos driven by desperation.
There's footage from Russia a few years back that's genuinely hard to watch. Walruses trying to scale cliffs because the beach below is so packed there's literally nowhere to go. Some fall. They die on impact. These are animals that evolved for ocean and ice, not mountaineering. They're not making stupid decisions they're trapped in an impossible situation we created.
And the worst part? They're still trying. They're still adapting, still showing up, still attempting to make it work in a world that's fundamentally changing beneath them.
What Makes a Walrus Worth Saving?
Here's my pitch. Walruses matter because they're proof that evolution doesn't optimize for beauty it optimizes for survival.
They're living evidence that you can be weird, awkward, ungainly, and equipped with features that seem almost comically impractical, and still be magnificent at what you do. They've taken a body plan that looks like a rough draft and turned it into mastery of one of Earth's harshest environments.
They're devoted parents. They're surprisingly social. They're intelligent, emotional, and capable of both tenderness and toughness. They can be gentle with their calves and fierce with threats. They've figured out how to live in massive groups without constant conflict. They've learned to find food in conditions that would kill most creatures.
And they ask for so little. ice to rest on, water to swim in, clams to eat, and space to just be the strange, wonderful animals they are.
But beyond all the practical reasons the ecological importance, the indicator species status, the role in Arctic food webs there's something else.
The world is better with weird things in it. It's richer, stranger, more interesting. And walruses are gloriously, unapologetically weird. They're proof that nature has a sense of humor and that sometimes the most unlikely combinations create something worth preserving.
The Last Word
I think about walruses sometimes when I'm feeling inadequate or out of place. When I'm convinced I don't quite fit, that I'm too much of this or not enough of that, that my particular combination of traits is somehow wrong for the world I'm trying to navigate.
And then I remember. There's an animal that weighs two tons, has teeth growing out of its face, uses its mustache to find dinner in the dark, and solves the problem of how do I get out of the water by stabbing ice with its face and dragging itself up.
That animal is thriving. Or was, until we started melting its home.
If walruses can make it work if they can take all that awkwardness and turn it into millions of years of success maybe there's hope for the rest of us strange creatures just trying to find our place.
We just need to make sure they still have a place to haul out when they need to rest.
Because a world without walruses isn't just a world with fewer species. It's a world with less proof that being different is exactly what makes you perfect.#walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL
