Image: US geological survey
For generations, Yupik and Inupiat hunters have depended on the Pacific walrus. They ate the walrus' meat and whittled its bones into tools. Walrus skin covered their boats, and walrus intestines, stitched into raincoats, covered their backs. Today, the walrus is still an important part of the subsistence diet in villages along Alaska's Chukchi and Bering sea coasts, and Native Alaskans sell handcrafts made from walrus ivory.
But as the Arctic warms, the landscape upon which both walruses and people depend is changing.
The behavior of sea ice is no longer predictable. Perhaps the best illustration of that came in the summer of 2007, when the Arctic's sea ice cover hit a record low, shattering the previous record by 460,000 square miles -- an area the size of Texas and California combined.
Changing habits of polar bears have drawn most of the attention, but walruses, which depend on drifting summer sea ice as a base for hunting and transportation through the Bering Strait, are changing, too. They are sheltering more on land in Alaska and Siberia.
For Alaska's indigenous hunters, whose lives meld modern conveniences with their traditional subsistence culture, the change threatens a way of life.
"The elders have been coming to me and saying a lot of the old ways -- their many years of observations of how ice was forming and moved, which made them extremely accurate local forecasters -- all of a sudden, those old traditional knowledge ways weren't working, and aren't working," said Gary Hufford, regional scientist for the National Weather Service's Alaska region.
On St. Lawrence Island, just south of the Bering Strait, for example, elders report that the ice's character has changed.
"It's thinner than people are used to seeing, and there's less old, heavy ice," said Hajo Eicken, a University of Alaska sea ice scientist who has worked closely with native communities to understand those changes. "There's less ice to melt in the spring, which means it actually can retreat much more quickly."
Adventures of a 2-ton tap dancer
At the heart of the story is the walrus.
Weighing up to 2 tons, the animals are massive and blubbery on land, set apart by their prominent tusks. Scientists invariably describe them as "gregarious" and intelligent, with a distinct preference for the "broken pack" sea ice whose patches of open water afford them quick escape from polar bears.
"They're funny to watch, humorous animals. If you see a bunch of walruses, they just lie all over each other," said G. Carleton Ray, a marine ecologist at the University of Virginia who research focuses on marine mammals in the Arctic.
They're also noisy, he said, describing the walrus's mating song as "tap-tap-tap-tap, another tap-tap-tap, then a sort of 'boing,'" followed by a whistle.
But the tale is different in the water. There, the walrus is an efficient hunter, using its stiff, sensitive whiskers to root through sediment on the ocean floor for clams, worms, snails and other bottom-dwellers. The walrus dislodges its prey from the muddy seafloor by spitting out a powerful jet of water. Grasping the food in its jaws, the walrus sucks clams and snails right out of their shells, rather than cracking into them to get at the meat.
Still, the animals are limited to hunting in relatively shallow waters, normally diving 60 to 70 meters -- about 200 feet -- to nab their seafloor prey. Each dive lasts about seven to eight minutes.
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7 Comments
Add CommentAdapt or perish. The environment will change. It changes faster because of human's population growth curve.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisC'mon, where are the dimwits? Where are the deniers? C'mon, tell us your hypotheses! Explain to us how a shrinkage in Arctic ice is actually an increase, like you've been lying about in Antarctica.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWill you be so cavalier when it is humans turn to "adapt or perish?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissisko says, "It changes faster because of human's population growth curve."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this****************
Are you trying to tell us that the population growth in the extreme far north is increasing and encroaching on the walrus?
World-wide population growth does tend to foster world-wide climatic problems, but it is a simplistic response to the problem.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is conceivable, however unlikely, that we could continue to grow as a species for quite some time. I don't mean to imply that that would be a good thing. There are ancient, current and emerging technologies (in the sense of methods - not silicon etc) that could save our bacon.
I'm afraid, though, that since these ways of doing things would upset the profit margins of 'the powers that be' we'll never see them applied in time, or on the scale necessary, to do the job.
Oh Well...
At the moment, the core of our discussions should be re-defining the human activities/existence in nature. It is obvious that romantic democracy system, which puts the humanity over everything has eventually failed. We need an amendmend in Constituton with following clauses:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1- Nature has absolute sovereignty and has the right to sustain.
2- Every person has the right to defend the Rights of Nature in Courts.
3- Waste producing human activities (including urbanization) can only be allowed if waste stabilization is provided in 20 years maximum.
If USA is not going to provoke above consciousness in the world, who is going to do it?
@lakota- I am stating that the number of humans on the planet overall are consuming resources and producing wastes at ever increasing rates per person. The per person consumption growth in consumption will continue to rise. If more is not done to eliminate worldwide population growth there will be consequences to the environment.
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