There's something profoundly human about a walrus that we don't often stop to consider. Maybe it's the way they lounge together in massive huddles, bodies pressed against one another like commuters on a morning train. Or perhaps it's in those whiskers—thousands of them, each one a sensitive fingertip exploring the murky seafloor for the next meal, the way we might run our hands along a wall in a darkened room.
I've spent time watching walruses, and what strikes me most isn't their size or their tusks, impressive as those are. It's the tenderness.
The Weight of Connection
A walrus mother will cradle her calf for two years, sometimes longer. She'll sing to it—yes, sing—a repertoire of bells and knocks and whistles that scientists are only beginning to understand. When danger approaches, she doesn't flee. She positions her body between threat and child, those ivory tusks suddenly transformed from feeding tools to shields.
Watch a group of walruses hauled out on an ice floe, and you'll see something like a neighborhood. There are the young troublemakers, testing boundaries, play-fighting with their developing tusks. The elders, scarred and massive, who've earned their spots in the center where it's warmest. And there's politics too—disputes over space, reconciliations, alliances that shift with the seasons.
The Loneliness of Changing Ice
But here's where the walrus becomes almost unbearably human: they're losing their home, and they know it.
In recent years, walruses have been hauling out on land in unprecedented numbers—not because they prefer rocky beaches to sea ice, but because the ice is simply gone. In 2019, a BBC crew filming Our Planet documented a heartbreaking scene: walruses climbing cliffs in search of rest, then falling to their deaths because exhaustion and poor eyesight made the descent impossible.
They're trying to adapt to a world that's changing faster than evolution ever prepared them for. Isn't that the most human struggle of all?
Survival Written in Whiskers
Each walrus has between 400 and 700 whiskers. Run your hand over a cat's whiskers and it will pull away—they're that sensitive. Now imagine 700 of them, each capable of detecting a clam buried in complete darkness under six feet of sediment. A walrus can eat 6,000 clams in a single feeding session, sucking the soft bodies from their shells with such precision that the shells remain intact.
This is how they survive in one of Earth's harshest environments: through patience, sensitivity, and an almost meditative attention to what lies beneath the surface. They dive, they search, they surface to breathe with their pod-mates, then they dive again.
There's no rushing a walrus. They've been doing this for millennia, in the same waters, following the same ice, eating the same clams. Until recently, it worked perfectly.
The Dignity of Adaptation
What I admire most about walruses is that they haven't given up. Young males still practice their underwater songs, hoping to attract females with the right combination of bells and pulses. Mothers still nurse their calves in frigid waters, still teach them where to find food and how to avoid orcas. The herds still gather, still touch, still maintain the social bonds that have always defined them.
They're not waiting for rescue. They're living, with whatever dignity they can muster, in the world as it is now.
When I think about what makes something human, I think about adaptation in the face of impossible odds. I think about fierce maternal love. I think about communities that stick together when times get hard. I think about singing in the darkness, hoping someone will hear.
By all those measures, the walrus is more human than we might be comfortable admitting. And if we're paying attention, they're teaching us something about how to live when the ground beneath you—or in their case, the ice—is no longer solid.
They're still here. Still diving, still singing, still pressing their massive bodies against one another for warmth. Still trying. Maybe that's the most human thing of all.
