Alaska’s walrus reports concentrate heavily on the North Slope, the Arctic coast where the Chukchi and Beaufort seas hold pack ice close to the shallow clam beds this species depends on. A smaller number of reports turn up far to the south, as far as Prince William Sound and Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, almost certainly wandering or stray animals well outside the walrus’s usual Bering and Chukchi Sea range.
A walrus doesn’t hunt by sight. It dives to the seafloor and sweeps a dense pad of stiff whiskers across the mud until it brushes a clam, then clears the sediment and sucks the meat free, leaving the shell behind. The long ivory tusks matter less for feeding than for hauling that heavy body out onto ice and settling disputes in a crowded herd.
Records peak sharply in May, tracking how closely Alaska’s walrus herds follow the seasonal edge of the sea ice: sightings climb as pack ice drifts into range of observers along the coast, then fall away once the ice pulls back north for summer.
Full species profile
