Crypto jeams

about a creature that spends its days lounging on ice floes with friends, sporting a magnificent mustache that would make any Victorian gentleman envious. The walrus that blubbery, whiskered icon of Arctic waters deserves far more appreciation than it typically receives.
While polar bears get the spotlight and penguins dominate the cute animal market despite living on opposite poles, walruses quietly go about their business, living lives that are surprisingly complex, emotional, and dare I say, relatable.
The Social Butterfly of Frozen Seas
Walruses are deeply social animals, and not in the superficial way we sometimes use that term. These animals genuinely crave companionship. They haul out onto ice or rocky beaches in groups that can number in the thousands, packed so tightly together that they're practically spooning. This isn't just about warmth or safety walruses seem to genuinely enjoy being close to one another.
Young walruses are particularly affectionate, nuzzling and playing with peers in ways that look remarkably like the roughhousing of human children. Adult walruses communicate through an impressive repertoire of bells, whistles, and grunts, each vocalization conveying different meanings. Males even produce elaborate underwater songs during mating season, which can last for days. Imagine being so committed to your love ballad that you sing continuously for 84 hours.
Those Magnificent Tusks Tell Stories
A walrus without tusks is like a knight without armor technically still themselves, but missing something essential to their identity. These elongated canine teeth, which can grow up to three feet long, serve multiple purposes that go beyond simple defense.
Walruses use their tusks to haul themselves out of the water the name "walrus" possibly derives from the Norse "hvalross," meaning "whale horse," though "tooth-walking seal" might be more accurate. They use them to maintain breathing holes in ice during harsh winters. They even use them to establish social hierarchies without excessive violence a tusk size comparison often settles disputes before things escalate.
But here's where it gets touching. older walruses with broken or worn tusks often struggle more with basic tasks. Their companions sometimes assist them, helping slower individuals keep up with the group. This kind of compassionate behavior speaks to a social intelligence we're only beginning to understand.
The Tenderness of Walrus Motherhood
Female walruses are devoted mothers in ways that would exhaust most humans. They nurse their calves for up to two years, sometimes longer, making walruses among the longest nursing mammals relative to their lifespan. During this time, mothers and calves develop intense bonds.
A mother walrus will fiercely defend her calf, charging at polar bears or even boats that venture too close. When frightened, calves clutch their mothers, and mothers have been observed cradling their young with their flippers in gestures that look heartbreakingly human. When a calf dies, mothers have been known to carry the body for days, seemingly unable to accept the loss.
This grief response isn't anthropomorphism it's observable behavior that suggests walruses experience emotional depth we're only beginning to acknowledge in non human animals.
Misunderstood and Underestimated
Part of why walruses don't receive the conservation attention they deserve might be their appearance. Let's be honest they're not conventionally attractive by human standards. Their wrinkled skin, bulging eyes, and hefty frames don't photograph with the same appeal as a sleek seal pup or majestic whale.
But spend time observing walruses, and you'll notice their expressiveness. Their faces, particularly around those sensitive whiskers, convey curiosity, contentment, irritation, and affection. Those whiskers technically called vibrissae contain thousands of nerve endings and help walruses locate clams and other mollusks on the murky ocean floor. A walrus can eat 4,000 to 6,000 clams in a single feeding session, using its whiskers and snout to find them, then sucking the meat out with remarkable precision.
Living in a Changing World
The walrus faces an uncertain future as Arctic ice disappears. These animals depend on sea ice as platforms for resting between feeding dives. As ice retreats farther from shallow feeding grounds, walruses must swim longer distances, expending energy and spending less time nurturing their young.
In recent years, massive haul outs on land have made headlines thousands of walruses crowded onto beaches because suitable ice is unavailable. These events can be deadly, particularly when disturbances cause stampedes that crush smaller individuals.
What strikes me most about the walrus situation is how little control these animals have over their fate. They've spent millennia perfecting their Arctic lifestyle, only to watch their habitat fundamentally change within a few generations. They can't adapt fast enough, can't migrate to better conditions, can't solve the problem through their considerable intelligence.
Why We Should Care
If you've read this far, you might be wondering why the fate of a whiskered ice dweller matters in your daily life. Here's my answer: walruses represent something essential about how we view the natural world.
These are not simple creatures running on pure instinct. They're emotional, intelligent, social beings who care for their young, grieve their losses, and depend on friendships and community bonds. They've developed complex survival strategies over hundreds of thousands of years. They sing, they play, they cooperate.
When we dismiss their struggles or fail to protect their habitat, we're not just losing a species we're losing a unique form of consciousness, a different way of experiencing and understanding the world.
The walrus won't write poetry about loss or create art depicting its vanishing ice. But it will continue nurturing its young with remarkable devotion, gathering with companions for warmth and connection, and navigating an increasingly difficult world with the same quiet dignity it's always shown.
That deserves our attention, our respect, and our action.
Perhaps it's time we looked past the ungainly exterior and recognized the walrus for what it truly is: a fellow traveler on this planet, worthy of a future as secure as the one we hope for ourselves.#walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL

I'll never forget the first time I truly saw a walrus. Not in a nature documentary with David Attenborough's soothing narration, but through the bleary lens of a research camera at an Arctic monitoring station, watching recorded footage at three in the morning because I couldn't sleep.
There he was let's call him Gerald attempting to join a group of other walruses on an ice floe. The thing about Gerald was that he was terrible at this. He tried climbing up one side, slid backward. Tried another angle, got halfway, then lost his grip and splashed unceremoniously back into the water. On his third attempt, he accidentally used another walrus as a stepping stool, which did not go over well.
I laughed so hard I snorted coffee out of my nose.
But here's what happened next that stopped me cold: Gerald finally made it up. And instead of the other walruses rejecting him for the chaos he'd caused, they just. shuffled over. Made room. One of them even let out what I swear was a reassuring grunt. Within minutes, Gerald was indistinguishable from the rest just another massive, whiskered body in the pile.
That's when I realized. walruses might understand something about belonging that we've forgotten.
The Democracy of the Dogpile
Walruses sleep in what can only be described as organized chaos. They heap onto each other without apparent regard for personal space, creating these massive, breathing mountains of blubber and tusks. A walrus on the bottom might be supporting a thousand pounds of neighbor. Another might be using someone's belly as a pillow. Flippers drape over backs. Heads rest on rumps.
And somehow, nobody complains.
There's no hierarchy in the sleeping pile. The biggest bull isn't automatically on top. The oldest female doesn't get the best spot. They arrange themselves through a kind of organic negotiation shifting, adjusting, accommodating until everyone fits. It's first come first served democracy with a healthy dose of "we're all in this together."
When's the last time humans managed that? We assign seats. We create VIP sections. We build literal and metaphorical walls to separate the comfortable from the uncomfortable, the important from the ordinary. Walruses just pile on and figure it out.
There's something deeply humbling about watching a species that weighs more than most cars practice more inclusive community building than we do.
The Terrible, Wonderful Teenage Years
Young walruses the teenagers, basically are disasters. Glorious, endearing disasters.
They practice their diving but surface in the wrong spot. They try to establish dominance with their tiny, still growing tusks and mostly just look adorable. They make terrible decisions, like attempting to haul out on ice that's clearly too small, or picking play fights with walruses twice their size. They have approximately zero chill.
And the adults? They tolerate it. More than tolerate they seem to expect it.
I watched one juvenile repeatedly belly flop onto an older male who was clearly trying to nap. The big guy would shift, resettle, close his eyes. The youngster would do it again. This happened maybe six times. Finally, the adult opened one eye, made a half hearted grumbling sound, then just. went back to sleep with the youngster sprawled across his back.
It reminded me of every exhausted parent who's ever said, Fine, you can watch one more episode, or every older sibling who's pretended to be annoyed but secretly loves being climbed on. The adults remember what it's like to be young, stupid, and figuring things out. They give grace because they once needed it too.
We could use more of this energy. Instead, we write think pieces about kids these days, we roll our eyes at young people making the same mistakes we made, we forget that everyone's teenager years were someone else's patience exercise.
The Broken Tusk Club
Not all walruses have perfect tusks. Some get broken in fights. Others grow in crooked or unevenly. Some walruses lose tusks entirely to injury or infection.
And you know what? They keep living. They adapt their techniques for climbing ice using flippers more, finding different angles. They adjust how they establish social standing. The tuskless ones figure out alternative ways to forage, to defend themselves, to navigate their world.
The rest of the group doesn't shun them. There's no Walrus Social Services removing them from the haul out. They're still part of the community, still valid members of the pile, still worthy of space and safety.
Compare this to how humans treat visible difference or disability. How often do we design spaces only for the "standard" body? How quickly do we other people whose bodies don't match our narrow definitions of normal? How much energy do we waste trying to fix or hide what we consider broken instead of just... adapting?
Walruses with broken tusks aren't inspiration porn. They're just walruses, living walrus lives, accommodated by a community that doesn't make accommodation feel like charity.
The Art of the Ugly Cry
When a walrus calf gets separated from its mother in rough seas or during a stampede, the sound it makes is devastating. It's not a dignified distress call. It's raw, desperate, keeningthe acoustic equivalent of a child's worst nightmare made real.
The mother's response is equally unfiltered. She doesn't maintain composure. She doesn't suppress her distress to appear strong. She calls back with the same desperate intensity, trumpeting her location, sometimes for hours, until they're reunited.
Other mothers join in sometimes, adding their voices to the search. The whole haul out seems to hold its breath until the pair finds each other again.
There's no stoicism, no keep calm and carry on, no performance of having it all together. Just pure, unvarnished emotion fear, relief, love expressed at full volume.
We've built entire cultures around emotional suppression. "Don't cry." "Stay strong." "Never let them see you sweat." We perform fine-ness even when we're falling apart. We apologize for our tears, for our worry, for our very human emotional responses to difficult situations.
Walruses suggest another way. feel it all, feel it loudly, let your community hear you, accept help when it's offered. Your ugly cry doesn't make you weak. It makes you real.
The Singles Who Choose the Group
Not every walrus pairs off. Not every female raises calves. Some bulls never establish the kind of dominance needed to attract mates. Some females, for whatever reason, don't reproduce.
And they still show up to the haul out. They still participate in the community. They help protect calves that aren't theirs. They contribute to the general noise and warmth and safety of numbers. Their lives have meaning beyond reproduction, beyond pairing, beyond the nuclear family structure.
In human society, we're still wrestling with the assumption that romantic partnership and parenthood are the primary markers of a successful life. We pity the perpetually single. We question the child free. We create hierarchies where coupled and parented people get more respect, more accommodation, more cultural validation.
Walruses don't do this. The bachelor bull sleeping on the edge of the pile is as much a part of the community as the mother with her calf. Contribution doesn't require reproduction. Value doesn't require romance.
Sometimes belonging is enough. Sometimes showing up, taking your space, and being part of the pile is a complete and worthy life.
Gerald's Lesson
Back to Gerald my awkward, persistent friend from that 3 AM video.
I've thought about him a lot over the years. About his repeated failures and his refusal to give up. About the community that absorbed his chaos without punishment. About the fact that an hour after his graceless arrival, you couldn't tell him apart from any other walrus in the pile.
We live in a world obsessed with perfect arrivals. The right education, the right job, the right relationship, the right life trajectory. We're supposed to climb onto our ice floes smoothly, without disruption, without asking for help, without using anyone else as a stepping stone (even accidentally).
And when we don't when we slip, when we fail, when we cause chaos we internalize it as personal failure. We assume we're not worthy of the pile.
Gerald taught me otherwise. Sometimes you're going to belly flop. Sometimes you're going to accidentally step on someone. Sometimes your arrival will be the opposite of graceful.
Come anyway. Try again. The pile has room.
That's not just walrus wisdom. That's the kind of truth that gets you through 3 AM moments when you can't sleep because you're replaying every awkward thing you've ever done. That's the kind of truth that says your messy, loud, imperfect existence still deserves space and warmth and community.
You don't have to be perfect to belong. You just have to show up and keep trying, like a three thousand pound mammal with ridiculous teeth and zero quit in him.
The pile will make room. It always does.#walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL

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

Jest coś głęboko zrozumiałego w patrzeniu, jak morszczuk wciąga się na płytkę lodową. To chrapliwe, chwiejne wysiłki, jak po tym zapadają się w niezgrabny stertę, a wąsy drżąc z czegoś, co można jedynie opisać jako zmęczona satysfakcja, wydaje się głęboko, niemal przytłaczająco ludzkie.
Często nie myślimy o morszczukach jako o istotach podobnych do nas. Są przecież dziwne, z ich zębami wyrastającymi z twarzy i tłustym ciałem. Ale jeśli spędzi się trochę czasu obserwując tych mieszkańców Arktyki, odkryje się, że dzielą z nami więcej, niż można by przypuszczać.

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

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

Znasz to uczucie, gdy wchodzisz na imprezę i od razu zdajesz sobie sprawę, że jesteś za bardzo, za mało lub po prostu źle ubrany? To dokładnie to, co czuje morszczuk przez całe życie, tylko morszczuk nie ma o tym pojęcia.
Wyobraź sobie, że zostajesz wyciągnięty na płytkę lodową w Arktyce. Temperatura jest gdzieś pomiędzy „dlaczego” a absolutnie nie. Wyglądasz jak bardzo duży ziemniak w pożyczonym kostiumie. Masz dwa ogromne zęby wypychające się z twarzy pod nieprzyjemnym kątem. Wąs wygląda tak, jakbyś przykleił szor do górnej wargi. A otaczają Cię tysiące innych ludzi o kształcie ziemniaka, którzy wyglądają dokładnie jak Ty.