On Sept. 27, a pilot spotted a semicircular mass of moving bodies near Point Lay, Alaska. Pacific walruses, an estimated 35,000 of them, had pulled up tusk to tail on the beach. These animals are social and like to come together in large numbers for protection and proximity. But scientists who study them are worried by gatherings like these because land is not the walrus’s preferred place to rest.
Sea ice is critical for all parts of the walrus life cycle. Adults dive and eat on the icy platforms. Females give birth and raise their pups there. On the ice, walruses can avoid predators and exhaustion; they are close to food and farther from harm.
As of today, according to daily sea ice tracking by the United States Geological Survey, walruses’ ice havens are gone. “There’s no ice in the Chukchi Sea — it’s entirely free,” said Anthony Fischbach, a wildlife biologist at the geological survey’s Alaska walrus research program. “It’s really stunning.”
But this isn’t the first time such large numbers of walruses have been seen congregating on Alaska’s shores. In the summer of 2007, sea ice extent hit a new low. That year, and for the first time in recorded history in Alaska, tens of thousands of Pacific walrus mothers and pups went ashore as the sea ice melted away. These massive haul-outs, as they are called, of females and babies have now occurred in six of the last eight summers in Alaska.
Chadwick V. Jay, also of the United States Geological Service walrus program, started working in the Arctic 20 years ago when the summer waters looked vastly different than they do now. “In the summer we’ve seen the sea ice recede far to the north,” he said. That change, according to Dr. Jay, is “making it very difficult for walruses to make a living.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/science/earth/in-alaska-thousands-of-walruses-take-to-land.html
