There's something profoundly unsettling about looking into a walrus's eyes for the first time. Not because they're alien or cold, but because they're startlingly familiar. Behind those dark, liquid pools sits an intelligence that feels uncomfortably close to our own a presence that seems to be looking back at you with equal curiosity.
I've been thinking about walruses lately, probably because I recently learned that they can live up to 40 years in the wild. Forty years. That's long enough to know a place intimately, to watch the ice patterns shift season after season, to recognize the same hauling out spots your mother showed you decades ago. It's long enough to accumulate what we might call, if we're being honest with ourselves, wisdom.
The thing nobody tells you about walruses is that they're deeply social creatures who seem to genuinely enjoy each other's company. When hundreds of them pile onto a beach or ice floe, they're not just tolerating proximity out of necessity. They actively seek contact, draping their enormous bodies over one another in what can only be described as communal napping. They vocalize constantly bellowing, whistling, knocking maintaining what researchers describe as a rich acoustic environment. In other words, they talk to each other. A lot.
Male walruses sing. And I don't mean they make mating calls I mean they sing elaborate underwater songs that can last for hours, combining bell like tones, knocks, and pulses into complex sequences. They do this in the darkness of Arctic waters, suspended in the cold, creating music that travels through the ocean like a whispered secret. Scientists who study these songs note that individuals have distinct vocal signatures. Each walrus sounds like himself.
What strikes me most about walruses, though, is their tenderness with their young. A mother walrus nurses her calf for up to two years, one of the longest nursing periods of any mammal. She'll carry her baby on her back through the water, protect it fiercely from predators, and teach it everything it needs to know about survival in one of Earth's harshest environments. If her calf dies, she's been observed carrying its body for days, reluctant to let go. This kind of grief, this inability to immediately accept loss, feels achingly human.
Their tusks those magnificent ivory daggers that can grow over three feet long serve as ice picks, weapons, and symbols of dominance. But they're also tools of remarkable gentleness. Walruses use them to help pull themselves onto ice, yes, but also to maintain breathing holes, to settle disputes without bloodshed (usually), and in social bonding. Walruses will rest their tusks on each other, a gesture that looks remarkably like what we might call affection.
The whiskers deserve their own paragraph. Each walrus has 400 to 700 whiskers on its snout, and they're not just decorative. These mystacial vibrissae are so sensitive that a walrus can detect a clam buried in sediment in complete darkness. They can distinguish shapes, textures, and sizes with their whiskers alone. Imagine navigating your world primarily through touch, feeling your way across the ocean floor like reading Braille, finding sustenance in the dark. A walrus can eat 4,000 to 6,000 clams in a single feeding session, locating each one by whisker touch, crushing it with powerful suction rather than its teeth, and spitting out the shell. It's a ballet of precision performed in absolute blackness.
Here's what keeps me up at night. walruses are losing their ice. As the Arctic warms, the sea ice they depend on for resting between feeding sessions is disappearing. In 2017, a phenomenon began appearing where tens of thousands of walruses crowded onto beaches in Alaska and Russia because there simply wasn't enough ice. These massive haul outs create dangerous conditions stampedes triggered by polar bears or aircraft can kill dozens of animals, particularly calves. The walruses aren't adapting poorly. they're being forced to adapt to conditions that have changed faster than evolution can accommodate.
A walrus has never cut down a tree, never burned fossil fuels, never designed a system of extraction and consumption. Yet they're among the first to pay the price for those of us who have. When I think about this, I think about those 40 year lifespans, about mothers teaching daughters the locations of good feeding grounds that may no longer exist by the time those daughters have daughters of their own.
But walruses persist. They are, above all, survivors. They've lived in the Arctic for millions of years, weathering ice ages and warm periods alike. They possess a stubborn vitality, a refusal to disappear quietly. When researchers approach them, adult walruses will position themselves between the threat and the young. They defend each other. They endure.
Perhaps what makes the walrus so compelling is this combination of vulnerability and strength, of tenderness and tusk. They remind us that survival in harsh places requires not just physical adaptation but social bonds, not just individual prowess but community care. They remind us that intelligence takes many forms, that devotion isn't unique to humans, that the desire to protect what you love is written deep in mammalian DNA.
The next time you see a walrus in a documentary, a photograph, or if you're extraordinarily fortunate, in person I invite you to look into those eyes. See if you recognize something there. See if, in that wrinkled face with its magnificent tusks and delicate whiskers, you glimpse a fellow being trying to make sense of a changing world, trying to protect its children, trying to find rest and food and connection in the cold.
You might find the experience, as I did, unexpectedly moving. We are not so different, the walrus and us. We both know what it means to love. We both know what it means to grieve. And we both, whether we acknowledge it or not, share the same uncertain future on this warming planet.#walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL
