Tusks, whiskers, and how to tell a walrus at a glance
Nothing else in Alaska’s waters looks like a walrus. Both sexes grow long ivory tusks, which are really overgrown canine teeth that keep growing throughout life. Around the muzzle sits a dense pad of stiff, wiry whiskers, called vibrissae, packed tightly enough to feel like a scrub brush. The skin runs from pale cinnamon to deep red-brown and often looks patchy or mottled, especially on animals that have just hauled out, when blood rushes back into the skin and turns it pink. A thick layer of blubber rounds out the body into the barrel shape that makes a resting walrus look almost boneless.
Finding food by touch, not by sight
A walrus doesn’t hunt clams the way a gull hunts fish. It dives to the seafloor, often in near-total darkness, and sweeps its whisker pad side to side until it brushes against a shell. Once it finds one, it clears away sediment with a jet of water from its mouth, then seals its lips around the clam and pulls the meat free with a strong, sudden suck, leaving the shell behind. A single dive can turn up dozens of clams this way. The tusks stay out of the process almost entirely. Their real jobs are hauling that heavy body out onto ice and pressing an advantage in a shoving match with another walrus.
Life on the pack ice
Walruses are built for the edge of the sea ice, not for open water or dry land. They rest in tight, noisy herds on ice floes between dives, sometimes piled on top of one another, and they need that ice to be close enough to good feeding grounds on the shallow Bering and Chukchi Sea floor. As the ice retreats north through summer, herds shift with it, and animals separated from ice sometimes crowd onto beaches instead, in numbers large enough to cause dangerous pileups. The seasonal pattern in the records below reflects that same relationship: sightings climb as the pack ice edges into reach of observers, then fall away once the ice pulls back out of range.
Calves and a slow-paced herd
Female walruses don’t reproduce quickly. A calf nurses for around two years, riding on its mother’s back in open water and staying close to her side on the ice long after it can swim and dive on its own. That long dependency, combined with a late age at first breeding, means a walrus population can’t bounce back fast from a bad stretch. Herds are led loosely by older, experienced females, and young animals learn where the reliable clam beds are by following them season after season rather than figuring it out alone.
Walruses, shrinking ice, and coastal Alaska
The IUCN lists the walrus as Vulnerable, and the reasoning isn’t abundance today so much as trajectory. Less summer sea ice means less resting habitat close to feeding grounds, forcing longer swims and bigger, riskier haul-outs on land. For coastal Alaska Native communities, walruses have been a subsistence resource for generations, providing meat, hide, and ivory under long-standing federal exemptions for Indigenous harvest, and their movements still shape where and when people travel and hunt along the coast. None of that makes the walrus rare in the way a handful of individuals left in the wild would be, but it does make its future harder to predict than its numbers alone suggest.
