Walrus

Introduction

The walrus is one of the largest animals living in the Arctic, a giant of the frozen north that spends its life between icy seas and snow-covered shores. Scientists know it by the name Odobenus rosmarus, which comes from Latin and Greek words meaning “one who walks with its teeth.” That unusual name makes sense once you see a walrus use its long tusks to pull itself out of the water and onto a slab of sea ice. Walruses are marine mammals, which means they are warm-blooded, breathe air, and nurse their young with milk, just like whales and seals. They belong to a group called pinnipeds, a family they share with seals and sea lions.

What They Look Like

An adult walrus is enormous, with males weighing as much as 1,800 kilograms (about 4,000 pounds) and stretching over three meters long. Females are smaller but still impressive, typically reaching around 1,200 kilograms. Their skin is thick and wrinkled, ranging from cinnamon brown to pinkish gray, and it can be up to five centimeters thick in places to protect them from the bitter Arctic cold. Beneath the skin lies a layer of blubber that can be fifteen centimeters deep, acting like a built-in winter coat. Their bodies are built for the water, with broad, flat flippers that help them steer through icy currents, yet they are surprisingly agile on land, able to rotate their hind flippers forward to walk on all fours.

The Tusks

Both male and female walruses grow long, ivory tusks that are actually elongated canine teeth, though males tend to have longer and thicker ones. These tusks can reach nearly a meter in length and continue growing throughout the animal’s life. Walruses use their tusks to chop breathing holes in ice from below and, most famously, to haul their heavy bodies out of the water onto ice floes, digging the tusks in like ice picks and heaving upward. Tusks also play an important role in social life: males display and clash tusks during competitions over mates, and a walrus with the longest tusks often earns a higher rank in the herd. Despite their fearsome appearance, tusks are rarely used as weapons against predators like polar bears or orcas.

Whiskers and Finding Food

A walrus’s face is covered in a thick pad of stiff, sensitive whiskers called vibrissae, and an adult may have between 400 and 700 of them. These whiskers are not just for show — they work like fingertips, detecting the shape and texture of objects on the dark, muddy ocean floor where visibility is almost zero. When a walrus dives to the bottom, it sweeps its snout along the sediment, using its vibrissae to locate clams, mussels, snails, and other shellfish hiding in the sand. Once it finds a clam, the walrus uses powerful suction from its mouth to pull the soft animal right out of the shell, often eating thousands of clams in a single feeding session. A walrus can dive to depths of around 80 meters and stay underwater for roughly ten minutes, and it can even slow its heart rate during dives to conserve oxygen.

Where They Live

Walruses are found in the shallow coastal waters of the Arctic Ocean, from northern Canada and Alaska across to Russia, Norway, and Greenland. They prefer areas where the sea is relatively shallow because their favorite prey, bottom-dwelling clams, lives on the ocean floor within diving reach. Sea ice is essential to their way of life: walruses rest on ice floes between feeding dives, give birth on the ice, and use it as a safe platform away from land-based predators. There are two recognized subspecies — the Atlantic walrus, found from eastern Canada to the seas around Svalbard, and the larger Pacific walrus, which lives in the Bering and Chukchi seas. As Arctic sea ice shrinks due to climate change, walruses are being forced onto crowded beaches, which puts extra stress on the animals, especially young calves.

Walruses are highly social creatures that gather in large groups called herds or haul-outs, sometimes numbering in the thousands on a single beach or ice floe. Within these herds, they lie packed tightly together, frequently resting their heads or flippers on their neighbors, and they communicate with a remarkable range of sounds including bellows, grunts, clicks, and whistles. Males can inflate special air sacs in their throats called pharyngeal pouches, which they use like built-in life jackets to float upright in the water while sleeping and to produce deep, bell-like sounds during mating displays. During the breeding season, males compete for the attention of females by singing underwater, clashing tusks, and showing off their size. Outside of breeding season, males and females often form separate groups, with mothers and calves staying together while the bulls gather on their own haul-outs.

Calves and Family

A mother walrus gives birth to a single calf after a pregnancy that lasts about fifteen months, and the newborn arrives weighing around 50 to 65 kilograms. Calves can swim almost immediately, but they spend much of their early life riding on their mother’s back as she swims through icy waters. The bond between mother and calf is one of the strongest in the animal kingdom: mothers nurse their young for over two years and fiercely protect them from predators, sometimes shielding them with their own bodies. Young walruses stay close to their mothers for up to five years, learning where to find food, how to haul out onto ice, and how to navigate the social rules of the herd. This long period of care means that walruses reproduce slowly, with females typically having a calf only once every three years.

Conservation

Walruses were once hunted heavily for their ivory tusks, oil, and hides, and by the early 1900s several populations had been driven dangerously low. Legal protections and hunting regulations helped many walrus populations recover over the twentieth century, and today Indigenous Arctic peoples such as the Inuit and Yupik are still permitted to hunt walruses for food, tools, and cultural traditions under carefully managed quotas. The biggest modern threat to walruses is climate change, which is causing Arctic sea ice to melt earlier in spring and form later in autumn, reducing the platforms walruses depend on for resting and raising their young. When ice disappears, walruses crowd onto rocky shorelines in massive numbers, and stampedes triggered by disturbances like aircraft or polar bears can injure or kill calves. Scientists and conservation groups are working to monitor walrus populations, protect key haul-out sites, and push for policies that address the warming of the Arctic.