Picture this: You're at the beach. You've been swimming for hours, you're exhausted, and now you have to get back onto the dock. Except you weigh 3,000 pounds, the dock is a slippery sheet of ice, and your only tools are two overgrown teeth and a set of flippers. Oh, and about 200 of your friends are watching.
This is just Tuesday for a walrus.
Yet somehow, they make it work. They heave, they grunt, they occasionally belly flop in spectacular fashion, and then once they're up they just lie there like they've accomplished something magnificent. Because they have.
The Art of the Graceless Arrival
Walruses have perfected something we humans struggle with daily. showing up exactly as they are, without apology.
When a walrus enters a haul out, there's no sneaking in quietly. There's no trying to look cool or unaffected. They arrive with all the elegance of a water balloon thrown at pavement loud, wet, and impossible to ignore. They might accidentally land on another walrus. They might slip backward twice before gaining purchase. They might emit a sound somewhere between a burp and a foghorn.
And then? They settle in like they own the place.
There's something liberating about this complete lack of self consciousness. Walruses don't seem to experience embarrassment. They don't replay their awkward ice mounting attempts in their heads at 3 AM. They just. move on. If only we could master this skill during our own ungraceful moments the stumbled presentations, the email typos sent to entire companies, the times we've waved back at someone who wasn't actually waving at us.
The Comfort in Being Weird Looking
Let's be honest: walruses are strange-looking animals. Those tusks jutting from their upper lips give them a permanent expression of surprised confusion. Their mustaches make them look like they're about to ask you about interest rates on a fixed mortgage. Their bodies are basically bean bag chairs with flippers.
And they simply do not care.
Male walruses will inflate air sacs in their throats to produce elaborate underwater songs essentially love ballads that sound like a combination of bells, knocks, and someone playing a wet synthesizer. These displays aren't subtle. They're weird, they're bold, and they work. Female walruses choose mates based partly on these bizarre acoustic performances, proving that confidence in your own weirdness is genuinely attractive.
How many of us hide our quirks, convinced they make us less lovable? The walrus says. lean into it. Make your strangeness your signature.
Masters of Uncomfortable Conversations
Walruses don't do passive aggression. When there's a conflict usually over prime real estate on a crowded ice floe they address it directly. Tusks are displayed. Vocalizations are made. Sometimes there's a brief, intense confrontation.
And then it's over. The hierarchy is established, positions are adjusted, and everyone goes back to napping in a massive, snoring pile.
Compare this to how humans handle conflict. we send cryptic text messages, we give the silent treatment, we complain to everyone except the person we're actually upset with, we let resentments simmer for years. Walruses show us another way direct, brief, resolved. They don't hold grudges because they can't afford to. When you live in tight quarters with limited real estate and survival depends on the group, you learn to clear the air and move forward.
The Courage to Be Vulnerable
Here's something remarkable. walrus mothers nurse their young in full view of everyone. There's no privacy, no separate nursery, no hiding the mess and difficulty of early parenthood. The whole community sees the struggles the calves that won't latch properly, the interrupted feedings when danger approaches, the exhaustion of a mother who hasn't eaten properly in weeks because she's been focused entirely on her offspring.
And other females help. They protect calves that aren't their own. They provide what we might call emotional support physical closeness, vocalizations, presence. It's vulnerability met with community care, a model that humans desperately need to remember.
We're taught to hide our struggles, to project competence and control at all times, to never let them see us sweat. Walruses remind us that vulnerability isn't weakness it's the price of admission to genuine community. When you let others see you struggling, you give them permission to help and to share their own struggles in return.
Foodies Without the Fuss
Walruses eat clams. Lots of clams. An adult can consume 6,000 clams in a single feeding session, using those sensitive whiskers to locate them on the dark ocean floor, then using hydraulic suction to essentially vacuum the soft parts out of the shells.
It's not glamorous. It's repetitive, methodical work. But they've become absolutely expert at it.
There's no walrus looking at another walrus's diet thinking, "Maybe I should try that trendy new diet of exotic fish everyone's talking about." They know what works for them, they know what their bodies need, and they stick with it. No shame, no second guessing, no comparison.
In our world of food trends, diet culture, and constant judgment about what and how we eat, the walrus offers refreshing clarity. find what nourishes you and don't apologize for it.
The Wisdom of Doing Nothing
On warm days (well, warm for the Arctic maybe 40°F), walruses engage in what can only be described as aggressive relaxation. They sprawl across ice or rocks, sometimes lying on their backs with flippers in the air, looking for all the world like they've completely given up on productivity.
Their skin turns rosy pink as blood vessels dilate, regulating their temperature. They might shift position every hour or so. They definitely snore. Some appear to smile in their sleep, whiskers twitching with whatever dreams occupy a walrus mind.
This isn't laziness it's essential temperature regulation and energy conservation. But it looks an awful lot like the kind of guilt free rest that humans struggle to grant themselves. We call rest "self care" now, as if we need to justify it with therapeutic language. We feel guilty about naps, about days spent doing "nothing productive," about simply existing without optimization.
Walruses understand something we've forgotten: rest is not something you earn. It's something you need. Full stop.
Living Loud in a Quiet World
The Arctic is often portrayed as this silent, pristine wilderness. Then you get near a walrus haul-out and discover it sounds like a combination of a construction site, a dysfunctional choir, and someone's plumbing having a breakdown.
Walruses are LOUD. They grunt, bellow, roar, whistle, click, and produce sounds that scientists have described as knocking, "tapping," and my personal favorite, "rasping." They are unapologetically noisy in a landscape that seems to demand quiet.
In a world that often asks us to shrink, to quiet down, to take up less space, walruses are a reminder that your existence is allowed to be loud. Your laughter can echo. Your opinions can resound. Your very presence can announce itself without shame.
The Lesson of the Ice Floe
Climate change is shrinking walrus habitat at an alarming rate. The ice platforms they depend on are disappearing, forcing them onto land in unprecedented numbers. The stress is enormous. The future is uncertain.
And still, walruses wake up each day and do walrus things. They dive for clams. They sing their weird songs. They pile onto each other in ridiculous heaps. They parent their young with fierce devotion. They exist fully, moment to moment, even as their world transforms.
They don't have the luxury of despair paralysis. So they adapt where they can, persist where they must, and continue living their large, loud, ungraceful lives with commitment.
Perhaps that's the deepest lesson: You don't need perfect conditions to live fully. You don't need to wait until everything is sorted out, until you've figured it all out, until the circumstances are ideal. You live now, as you are, where you are, with what you have.
Just like a 3,000 pound mammal with ridiculous teeth and no sense of embarrassment, hauling itself onto the ice one more time, ready to take up space in the world without apology.
That's not just survival. That's artistry.#walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL
