Discovery.com - Kieran Mulvaney, 10/02/13
If you see a walrus in the wild, chances are you’ll see other walruses with it. A lot of other walruses. And it doesn’t matter if the ice floe that they have chosen as the spot on which to rest is seemingly far too small to accommodate such a massive quantity of blubber and tusk: Like a Great Dane that doesn’t know it isn’t supposed to be a lap dog, they will somehow squeeze their collective bulk onto it. It can be, candidly, an amusing sight: a floating platform of ice barely visible beneath a mound of giant pinnipeds.
However, as is well known, Arctic sea ice is diminishing in extent — and, in places such as the north of Alaska, is retreating farther from the shore over summer. That means that instead of being over the shallow areas of the continental shelf, it is now in deeper waters, too deep for walruses to repeatedly make dives. And so instead, they swim back to shore, where they gather in massive haulouts. Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have documented just such a haulout on a barrier island near the village of Point Lay in northwest Alaska. Using aerial photographs, scientists estimated that the area initially contained 1,500 to 4,000 animals on Sept. 12. The number of walruses had increased to 5,500-8,000 when sighted on Sept. 22, and on Sept. 27, biologists estimated that there were approximately 10,000 walruses. (Awesome zoomable photograph here).
Video and more: Discovery.com
