Crypto jeams

I'll never forget the first time I truly saw a walrus. Not in a nature documentary with David Attenborough's soothing narration, but through the bleary lens of a research camera at an Arctic monitoring station, watching recorded footage at three in the morning because I couldn't sleep.
There he was let's call him Gerald attempting to join a group of other walruses on an ice floe. The thing about Gerald was that he was terrible at this. He tried climbing up one side, slid backward. Tried another angle, got halfway, then lost his grip and splashed unceremoniously back into the water. On his third attempt, he accidentally used another walrus as a stepping stool, which did not go over well.
I laughed so hard I snorted coffee out of my nose.
But here's what happened next that stopped me cold: Gerald finally made it up. And instead of the other walruses rejecting him for the chaos he'd caused, they just. shuffled over. Made room. One of them even let out what I swear was a reassuring grunt. Within minutes, Gerald was indistinguishable from the rest just another massive, whiskered body in the pile.
That's when I realized. walruses might understand something about belonging that we've forgotten.
The Democracy of the Dogpile
Walruses sleep in what can only be described as organized chaos. They heap onto each other without apparent regard for personal space, creating these massive, breathing mountains of blubber and tusks. A walrus on the bottom might be supporting a thousand pounds of neighbor. Another might be using someone's belly as a pillow. Flippers drape over backs. Heads rest on rumps.
And somehow, nobody complains.
There's no hierarchy in the sleeping pile. The biggest bull isn't automatically on top. The oldest female doesn't get the best spot. They arrange themselves through a kind of organic negotiation shifting, adjusting, accommodating until everyone fits. It's first come first served democracy with a healthy dose of "we're all in this together."
When's the last time humans managed that? We assign seats. We create VIP sections. We build literal and metaphorical walls to separate the comfortable from the uncomfortable, the important from the ordinary. Walruses just pile on and figure it out.
There's something deeply humbling about watching a species that weighs more than most cars practice more inclusive community building than we do.
The Terrible, Wonderful Teenage Years
Young walruses the teenagers, basically are disasters. Glorious, endearing disasters.
They practice their diving but surface in the wrong spot. They try to establish dominance with their tiny, still growing tusks and mostly just look adorable. They make terrible decisions, like attempting to haul out on ice that's clearly too small, or picking play fights with walruses twice their size. They have approximately zero chill.
And the adults? They tolerate it. More than tolerate they seem to expect it.
I watched one juvenile repeatedly belly flop onto an older male who was clearly trying to nap. The big guy would shift, resettle, close his eyes. The youngster would do it again. This happened maybe six times. Finally, the adult opened one eye, made a half hearted grumbling sound, then just. went back to sleep with the youngster sprawled across his back.
It reminded me of every exhausted parent who's ever said, Fine, you can watch one more episode, or every older sibling who's pretended to be annoyed but secretly loves being climbed on. The adults remember what it's like to be young, stupid, and figuring things out. They give grace because they once needed it too.
We could use more of this energy. Instead, we write think pieces about kids these days, we roll our eyes at young people making the same mistakes we made, we forget that everyone's teenager years were someone else's patience exercise.
The Broken Tusk Club
Not all walruses have perfect tusks. Some get broken in fights. Others grow in crooked or unevenly. Some walruses lose tusks entirely to injury or infection.
And you know what? They keep living. They adapt their techniques for climbing ice using flippers more, finding different angles. They adjust how they establish social standing. The tuskless ones figure out alternative ways to forage, to defend themselves, to navigate their world.
The rest of the group doesn't shun them. There's no Walrus Social Services removing them from the haul out. They're still part of the community, still valid members of the pile, still worthy of space and safety.
Compare this to how humans treat visible difference or disability. How often do we design spaces only for the "standard" body? How quickly do we other people whose bodies don't match our narrow definitions of normal? How much energy do we waste trying to fix or hide what we consider broken instead of just... adapting?
Walruses with broken tusks aren't inspiration porn. They're just walruses, living walrus lives, accommodated by a community that doesn't make accommodation feel like charity.
The Art of the Ugly Cry
When a walrus calf gets separated from its mother in rough seas or during a stampede, the sound it makes is devastating. It's not a dignified distress call. It's raw, desperate, keeningthe acoustic equivalent of a child's worst nightmare made real.
The mother's response is equally unfiltered. She doesn't maintain composure. She doesn't suppress her distress to appear strong. She calls back with the same desperate intensity, trumpeting her location, sometimes for hours, until they're reunited.
Other mothers join in sometimes, adding their voices to the search. The whole haul out seems to hold its breath until the pair finds each other again.
There's no stoicism, no keep calm and carry on, no performance of having it all together. Just pure, unvarnished emotion fear, relief, love expressed at full volume.
We've built entire cultures around emotional suppression. "Don't cry." "Stay strong." "Never let them see you sweat." We perform fine-ness even when we're falling apart. We apologize for our tears, for our worry, for our very human emotional responses to difficult situations.
Walruses suggest another way. feel it all, feel it loudly, let your community hear you, accept help when it's offered. Your ugly cry doesn't make you weak. It makes you real.
The Singles Who Choose the Group
Not every walrus pairs off. Not every female raises calves. Some bulls never establish the kind of dominance needed to attract mates. Some females, for whatever reason, don't reproduce.
And they still show up to the haul out. They still participate in the community. They help protect calves that aren't theirs. They contribute to the general noise and warmth and safety of numbers. Their lives have meaning beyond reproduction, beyond pairing, beyond the nuclear family structure.
In human society, we're still wrestling with the assumption that romantic partnership and parenthood are the primary markers of a successful life. We pity the perpetually single. We question the child free. We create hierarchies where coupled and parented people get more respect, more accommodation, more cultural validation.
Walruses don't do this. The bachelor bull sleeping on the edge of the pile is as much a part of the community as the mother with her calf. Contribution doesn't require reproduction. Value doesn't require romance.
Sometimes belonging is enough. Sometimes showing up, taking your space, and being part of the pile is a complete and worthy life.
Gerald's Lesson
Back to Gerald my awkward, persistent friend from that 3 AM video.
I've thought about him a lot over the years. About his repeated failures and his refusal to give up. About the community that absorbed his chaos without punishment. About the fact that an hour after his graceless arrival, you couldn't tell him apart from any other walrus in the pile.
We live in a world obsessed with perfect arrivals. The right education, the right job, the right relationship, the right life trajectory. We're supposed to climb onto our ice floes smoothly, without disruption, without asking for help, without using anyone else as a stepping stone (even accidentally).
And when we don't when we slip, when we fail, when we cause chaos we internalize it as personal failure. We assume we're not worthy of the pile.
Gerald taught me otherwise. Sometimes you're going to belly flop. Sometimes you're going to accidentally step on someone. Sometimes your arrival will be the opposite of graceful.
Come anyway. Try again. The pile has room.
That's not just walrus wisdom. That's the kind of truth that gets you through 3 AM moments when you can't sleep because you're replaying every awkward thing you've ever done. That's the kind of truth that says your messy, loud, imperfect existence still deserves space and warmth and community.
You don't have to be perfect to belong. You just have to show up and keep trying, like a three thousand pound mammal with ridiculous teeth and zero quit in him.
The pile will make room. It always does.#walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL

Picture this: You're at the beach. You've been swimming for hours, you're exhausted, and now you have to get back onto the dock. Except you weigh 3,000 pounds, the dock is a slippery sheet of ice, and your only tools are two overgrown teeth and a set of flippers. Oh, and about 200 of your friends are watching.
This is just Tuesday for a walrus.
Yet somehow, they make it work. They heave, they grunt, they occasionally belly flop in spectacular fashion, and then once they're up they just lie there like they've accomplished something magnificent. Because they have.
The Art of the Graceless Arrival
Walruses have perfected something we humans struggle with daily. showing up exactly as they are, without apology.
When a walrus enters a haul out, there's no sneaking in quietly. There's no trying to look cool or unaffected. They arrive with all the elegance of a water balloon thrown at pavement loud, wet, and impossible to ignore. They might accidentally land on another walrus. They might slip backward twice before gaining purchase. They might emit a sound somewhere between a burp and a foghorn.
And then? They settle in like they own the place.
There's something liberating about this complete lack of self consciousness. Walruses don't seem to experience embarrassment. They don't replay their awkward ice mounting attempts in their heads at 3 AM. They just. move on. If only we could master this skill during our own ungraceful moments the stumbled presentations, the email typos sent to entire companies, the times we've waved back at someone who wasn't actually waving at us.
The Comfort in Being Weird Looking
Let's be honest: walruses are strange-looking animals. Those tusks jutting from their upper lips give them a permanent expression of surprised confusion. Their mustaches make them look like they're about to ask you about interest rates on a fixed mortgage. Their bodies are basically bean bag chairs with flippers.
And they simply do not care.
Male walruses will inflate air sacs in their throats to produce elaborate underwater songs essentially love ballads that sound like a combination of bells, knocks, and someone playing a wet synthesizer. These displays aren't subtle. They're weird, they're bold, and they work. Female walruses choose mates based partly on these bizarre acoustic performances, proving that confidence in your own weirdness is genuinely attractive.
How many of us hide our quirks, convinced they make us less lovable? The walrus says. lean into it. Make your strangeness your signature.
Masters of Uncomfortable Conversations
Walruses don't do passive aggression. When there's a conflict usually over prime real estate on a crowded ice floe they address it directly. Tusks are displayed. Vocalizations are made. Sometimes there's a brief, intense confrontation.
And then it's over. The hierarchy is established, positions are adjusted, and everyone goes back to napping in a massive, snoring pile.
Compare this to how humans handle conflict. we send cryptic text messages, we give the silent treatment, we complain to everyone except the person we're actually upset with, we let resentments simmer for years. Walruses show us another way direct, brief, resolved. They don't hold grudges because they can't afford to. When you live in tight quarters with limited real estate and survival depends on the group, you learn to clear the air and move forward.
The Courage to Be Vulnerable
Here's something remarkable. walrus mothers nurse their young in full view of everyone. There's no privacy, no separate nursery, no hiding the mess and difficulty of early parenthood. The whole community sees the struggles the calves that won't latch properly, the interrupted feedings when danger approaches, the exhaustion of a mother who hasn't eaten properly in weeks because she's been focused entirely on her offspring.
And other females help. They protect calves that aren't their own. They provide what we might call emotional support physical closeness, vocalizations, presence. It's vulnerability met with community care, a model that humans desperately need to remember.
We're taught to hide our struggles, to project competence and control at all times, to never let them see us sweat. Walruses remind us that vulnerability isn't weakness it's the price of admission to genuine community. When you let others see you struggling, you give them permission to help and to share their own struggles in return.
Foodies Without the Fuss
Walruses eat clams. Lots of clams. An adult can consume 6,000 clams in a single feeding session, using those sensitive whiskers to locate them on the dark ocean floor, then using hydraulic suction to essentially vacuum the soft parts out of the shells.
It's not glamorous. It's repetitive, methodical work. But they've become absolutely expert at it.
There's no walrus looking at another walrus's diet thinking, "Maybe I should try that trendy new diet of exotic fish everyone's talking about." They know what works for them, they know what their bodies need, and they stick with it. No shame, no second guessing, no comparison.
In our world of food trends, diet culture, and constant judgment about what and how we eat, the walrus offers refreshing clarity. find what nourishes you and don't apologize for it.
The Wisdom of Doing Nothing
On warm days (well, warm for the Arctic maybe 40°F), walruses engage in what can only be described as aggressive relaxation. They sprawl across ice or rocks, sometimes lying on their backs with flippers in the air, looking for all the world like they've completely given up on productivity.
Their skin turns rosy pink as blood vessels dilate, regulating their temperature. They might shift position every hour or so. They definitely snore. Some appear to smile in their sleep, whiskers twitching with whatever dreams occupy a walrus mind.
This isn't laziness it's essential temperature regulation and energy conservation. But it looks an awful lot like the kind of guilt free rest that humans struggle to grant themselves. We call rest "self care" now, as if we need to justify it with therapeutic language. We feel guilty about naps, about days spent doing "nothing productive," about simply existing without optimization.
Walruses understand something we've forgotten: rest is not something you earn. It's something you need. Full stop.
Living Loud in a Quiet World
The Arctic is often portrayed as this silent, pristine wilderness. Then you get near a walrus haul-out and discover it sounds like a combination of a construction site, a dysfunctional choir, and someone's plumbing having a breakdown.
Walruses are LOUD. They grunt, bellow, roar, whistle, click, and produce sounds that scientists have described as knocking, "tapping," and my personal favorite, "rasping." They are unapologetically noisy in a landscape that seems to demand quiet.
In a world that often asks us to shrink, to quiet down, to take up less space, walruses are a reminder that your existence is allowed to be loud. Your laughter can echo. Your opinions can resound. Your very presence can announce itself without shame.
The Lesson of the Ice Floe
Climate change is shrinking walrus habitat at an alarming rate. The ice platforms they depend on are disappearing, forcing them onto land in unprecedented numbers. The stress is enormous. The future is uncertain.
And still, walruses wake up each day and do walrus things. They dive for clams. They sing their weird songs. They pile onto each other in ridiculous heaps. They parent their young with fierce devotion. They exist fully, moment to moment, even as their world transforms.
They don't have the luxury of despair paralysis. So they adapt where they can, persist where they must, and continue living their large, loud, ungraceful lives with commitment.
Perhaps that's the deepest lesson: You don't need perfect conditions to live fully. You don't need to wait until everything is sorted out, until you've figured it all out, until the circumstances are ideal. You live now, as you are, where you are, with what you have.
Just like a 3,000 pound mammal with ridiculous teeth and no sense of embarrassment, hauling itself onto the ice one more time, ready to take up space in the world without apology.
That's not just survival. That's artistry.#walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL

There's something profoundly relatable about watching a walrus haul itself onto an ice floe. That grunting, shuffling effort the way they collapse in an ungainly heap afterward, whiskers twitching with what can only be described as exhausted satisfaction feels deeply, almost embarrassingly human.
We don't often think of walruses as kindred spirits. They're odd looking creatures, after all, with their tusked faces and blubbery bulk. But spend any time observing these Arctic dwellers, and you'll find they share more with us than you might expect.
The Social Butterfly of the Frozen North
Walruses are incurable extroverts. They gather in massive haul outs sometimes thousands strong piled atop one another like concertgoers at a festival who've given up on personal space. They're tactile, affectionate, and surprisingly chatty. Their repertoire of sounds includes bell like chimes, barks, growls, and whistles that echo across the ice like gossip traveling through a crowded café.
And like humans, they have their favorite companions. Studies show walruses form bonds, returning to the same individuals year after year. They recognize each other's voices, remember grudges, and apparently enjoy just hanging out together even when there's no particular survival reason to do so. It's community for community's sake something we can surely understand.
The Anxious Perfectionist Parent
Mother walruses are devoted to the point of neurosis. They nurse their calves for up to two years, one of the longest nursing periods of any mammal. During this time, they're fiercely protective, constantly vigilant, teaching their young everything from how to find the best clams to the politics of haul out hierarchy.
If a calf becomes separated in the chaos of a crowded ice floe, the mother's distress calls are heartbreaking a desperate, trumpeting search that continues until they're reunited. Other females will sometimes help protect or even nurse orphaned calves, a kind of communal childcare that speaks to both empathy and shared responsibility.
The Stressed Out Commuter
Here's where things get uncomfortably familiar: walruses are dealing with a housing crisis. Climate change has reduced their preferred ice platforms, forcing larger and larger groups to crowd onto smaller spaces or onto rocky shores that their bodies weren't really designed for. The stress is visible. Haul outs have become more chaotic, more competitive, more dangerous.
When spooked by a polar bear, a boat, or even a low flying aircraft panic stampedes occur. Walruses crush each other in their desperation to reach the water, particularly the young and weak. It's a tragedy born of circumstances beyond their control, of a world changing faster than they can adapt. If that doesn't mirror the human experience of navigating systems not built for our well being, I don't know what does.
The Skilled Professional
Despite their lumbering appearance on land, walruses are masters of their craft. They can dive to depths of 300 feet, holding their breath for up to 30 minutes while they hunt. Their whiskers those magnificent, sensitive bristles can detect a clam buried in sediment from inches away. They're using specialized tools (those whiskers) with expert precision, not unlike a surgeon with a scalpel or a craftsperson with their instrument of choice.
And those tusks? Not just for show. Walruses use them as ice picks to haul themselves from the water hence the name, from the Old Norse hrosshvalr, meaning horse whale. They use them to establish social rank, to defend themselves, even to maintain breathing holes in the ice. They're multi-tools carried everywhere, the Arctic equivalent of a smartphone.
The Contemplative Sunbather
Perhaps the most endearing walrus quality is their apparent love of just. being. On a calm Arctic day, haul outs become spas. Walruses bask in the sun, shifting their massive bodies to catch the best angle of warmth. Their skin changes from grayish brown to pink as blood vessels dilate in the heat a visible flush of contentment.
They seem, in these moments, to be doing nothing of survival value. They're not feeding, mating, or evading predators. They're simply existing in whatever comfort they can find, enjoying the company of others, soaking up the rare Arctic sun.
It's a reminder that not everything needs purpose. Sometimes existence itself with others who understand you, in a place you call home is enough.
Looking Across the Ice
The walrus doesn't ask to be our mirror, but there it is anyway. social, devoted, anxious, skilled, and searching for comfort in an increasingly uncomfortable world. They face their challenges with the same mixture of resilience and vulnerability that defines our own species.
Next time you see a walrus in a documentary, at an aquarium, or in a photograph look past the tusks and the whiskers. Look for the neighbor crammed into an overcrowded space, the parent worrying about their child, the professional practicing their craft, the friend seeking companionship.
You might just recognize someone you know.#walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL

There's something profoundly unsettling about looking into a walrus's eyes for the first time. Not because they're alien or cold, but because they're startlingly familiar. Behind those dark, liquid pools sits an intelligence that feels uncomfortably close to our own a presence that seems to be looking back at you with equal curiosity.
I've been thinking about walruses lately, probably because I recently learned that they can live up to 40 years in the wild. Forty years. That's long enough to know a place intimately, to watch the ice patterns shift season after season, to recognize the same hauling out spots your mother showed you decades ago. It's long enough to accumulate what we might call, if we're being honest with ourselves, wisdom.
The thing nobody tells you about walruses is that they're deeply social creatures who seem to genuinely enjoy each other's company. When hundreds of them pile onto a beach or ice floe, they're not just tolerating proximity out of necessity. They actively seek contact, draping their enormous bodies over one another in what can only be described as communal napping. They vocalize constantly bellowing, whistling, knocking maintaining what researchers describe as a rich acoustic environment. In other words, they talk to each other. A lot.
Male walruses sing. And I don't mean they make mating calls I mean they sing elaborate underwater songs that can last for hours, combining bell like tones, knocks, and pulses into complex sequences. They do this in the darkness of Arctic waters, suspended in the cold, creating music that travels through the ocean like a whispered secret. Scientists who study these songs note that individuals have distinct vocal signatures. Each walrus sounds like himself.
What strikes me most about walruses, though, is their tenderness with their young. A mother walrus nurses her calf for up to two years, one of the longest nursing periods of any mammal. She'll carry her baby on her back through the water, protect it fiercely from predators, and teach it everything it needs to know about survival in one of Earth's harshest environments. If her calf dies, she's been observed carrying its body for days, reluctant to let go. This kind of grief, this inability to immediately accept loss, feels achingly human.
Their tusks those magnificent ivory daggers that can grow over three feet long serve as ice picks, weapons, and symbols of dominance. But they're also tools of remarkable gentleness. Walruses use them to help pull themselves onto ice, yes, but also to maintain breathing holes, to settle disputes without bloodshed (usually), and in social bonding. Walruses will rest their tusks on each other, a gesture that looks remarkably like what we might call affection.
The whiskers deserve their own paragraph. Each walrus has 400 to 700 whiskers on its snout, and they're not just decorative. These mystacial vibrissae are so sensitive that a walrus can detect a clam buried in sediment in complete darkness. They can distinguish shapes, textures, and sizes with their whiskers alone. Imagine navigating your world primarily through touch, feeling your way across the ocean floor like reading Braille, finding sustenance in the dark. A walrus can eat 4,000 to 6,000 clams in a single feeding session, locating each one by whisker touch, crushing it with powerful suction rather than its teeth, and spitting out the shell. It's a ballet of precision performed in absolute blackness.
Here's what keeps me up at night. walruses are losing their ice. As the Arctic warms, the sea ice they depend on for resting between feeding sessions is disappearing. In 2017, a phenomenon began appearing where tens of thousands of walruses crowded onto beaches in Alaska and Russia because there simply wasn't enough ice. These massive haul outs create dangerous conditions stampedes triggered by polar bears or aircraft can kill dozens of animals, particularly calves. The walruses aren't adapting poorly. they're being forced to adapt to conditions that have changed faster than evolution can accommodate.
A walrus has never cut down a tree, never burned fossil fuels, never designed a system of extraction and consumption. Yet they're among the first to pay the price for those of us who have. When I think about this, I think about those 40 year lifespans, about mothers teaching daughters the locations of good feeding grounds that may no longer exist by the time those daughters have daughters of their own.
But walruses persist. They are, above all, survivors. They've lived in the Arctic for millions of years, weathering ice ages and warm periods alike. They possess a stubborn vitality, a refusal to disappear quietly. When researchers approach them, adult walruses will position themselves between the threat and the young. They defend each other. They endure.
Perhaps what makes the walrus so compelling is this combination of vulnerability and strength, of tenderness and tusk. They remind us that survival in harsh places requires not just physical adaptation but social bonds, not just individual prowess but community care. They remind us that intelligence takes many forms, that devotion isn't unique to humans, that the desire to protect what you love is written deep in mammalian DNA.
The next time you see a walrus in a documentary, a photograph, or if you're extraordinarily fortunate, in person I invite you to look into those eyes. See if you recognize something there. See if, in that wrinkled face with its magnificent tusks and delicate whiskers, you glimpse a fellow being trying to make sense of a changing world, trying to protect its children, trying to find rest and food and connection in the cold.
You might find the experience, as I did, unexpectedly moving. We are not so different, the walrus and us. We both know what it means to love. We both know what it means to grieve. And we both, whether we acknowledge it or not, share the same uncertain future on this warming planet.#walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL

There's a moment that happens when you see a walrus for the first time. Not in a picture in real life. Your brain does this little stutter-step, like it's trying to process what your eyes are telling it and keeps coming back with error. does not compute.
Because walruses are.a lot.
They're enormous and wrinkled and have teeth growing out of their face in a way that suggests someone lost the instruction manual halfway through assembly. They smell like fish and wet dog and regret. They make sounds that range from angry plumbing to ghost in a synthesizer. And yet, when you actually spend time observing them, something shifts. You start to realize that these bizarre, blubbery giants are living their absolute best lives, and frankly, they might be onto something the rest of us missed.
When God Made the Walrus, He Was Definitely Winging It
Let's be brutally honest about walrus aesthetics. If animals had yearbook superlatives, Most Likely to Be Mistaken for a Pile of Laundry would go to the walrus every single time.
They've got the body of a bean bag chair that's been overstuffed and left out in the rain. Their skin doesn't so much cover their body as drape over it apologetically, creating rolls and folds in places you didn't know could have rolls and folds. They're colored in shades that paint companies would call Sad Taupe or Existential Gray, though they can flush to a sunburned pink that makes them look like they've been hitting the sauce too hard.
And those tusks. Sweet mercy, those tusks.
These aren't dainty little decorative points. These are full on ivory sabers that can grow to three feet long, jutting from their upper jaw at angles that seem both aggressive and deeply inconvenient. Imagine trying to eat soup with two massive stilts sticking out of your mouth. Now imagine that this is just. your face. Forever.
But here's what gets me: Walruses have zero self consciousness about any of this. A walrus has never once looked in a reflective ice puddle and thought, Maybe I should do something about these tusks. A walrus has never sucked in its gut when another walrus swam by. They just ARE, fully and completely, without apology or explanation.
That's some next level confidence.
The Whisker Situation Requires Its Own Paragraph
We need to discuss the mustache, because calling it a mustache is like calling the Grand Canyon a ditch.
A walrus has between 400 and 700 mystacial vibrissae which is the scientific term for face whiskers that are doing some serious heavy lifting. These aren't the cute little whiskers you see on a cat. These are thick, stiff bristles arranged in rows that make the walrus look like it's cosplaying as a Victorian sea captain who takes himself very seriously.
But function over form, right? Those whiskers are so sensitive they can detect a clam buried in mud from several inches away, in complete darkness, through several layers of sediment. Each whisker has its own blood supply and nerve bundle. They're essentially fingers growing out of the walrus's face blind fingers that can read texture, shape, and movement with absurd precision.
Here's what that means in practice. A walrus descends to the ocean floor where it's darker than your soul at 3 AM on a Monday. The water pressure is crushing. The temperature would freeze your eyeballs. And the walrus just. starts sweeping its face across the seafloor like a living metal detector, finding clams with a success rate that would make professional treasure hunters weep with envy.
When it finds a clam and it always finds the clam it jets water from its mouth to blast away the mud, then creates a vacuum seal with its lips and sucks the meat right out of the shell with enough force to. actually, I don't want to think too hard about the physics of walrus suction. Let's just say it's impressive and leave it there.
Six thousand clams per feeding session. Six. Thousand. That's not a meal. that's a personal vendetta against shellfish.
The Social Contract of Being Huge and Awkward Together
If you've ever been to a crowded subway car, a packed elevator, or a sold out concert, you know that uncomfortable feeling of being pressed against strangers while pretending everything is totally fine and normal. Your personal space has been violated. Theirs has too. Everyone's just trying to get through this without making it weird.
Now imagine that scenario, except there are ten thousand of you, you're all shaped like water balloons filled with pudding, you weigh two tons apiece, you're lying on rocks or ice, and you're all just. fine with it.
That's a walrus haul out.
Walruses are intensely social animals who have somehow figured out how to exist in extremely close quarters without descending into complete chaos. Sure, there are occasional disagreements. Tusks get brandished. Someone gets too pushy and receives a jab. There's grumbling and bellowing and the occasional full-blown shoving match. But considering the density and the fact that everyone's armed with literal face spears, it's remarkable how well they coexist.
There's a hierarchy, of course. Bigger tusks generally mean higher status, especially among males. Bulls will display their tusks to each other in what can only be described as aggressive comparison the walrus version of mine's bigger than yours. Sometimes this escalates. Two males will rear up, interlock tusks, and push against each other while making sounds that suggest they're both equally committed to and annoyed by this whole process.
But most of the time? They're just. there. Together. Piled up like cordwood with mustaches. Sleeping, resting, occasionally shifting position, letting out the occasional snort or grunt that might mean excuse me or watch it, buddy or possibly just I exist and everyone should know about it.
Motherhood: The Walrus Edition
If you want to see the tender side of these blubbery behemoths, watch a mother with her calf.
Female walruses give birth to a single calf after a pregnancy that lasts about 15 monthswhich is already a commitment that deserves respect. That calf will stay with mom for up to three years, nursing, learning, and being protected with a ferocity that makes mama bears look like casual babysitters.
A mother walrus is constantly vocalizing to her baby. It's a mix of grunts, barks, whistles, and bellows that probably translate to the universal language of mothers everywhere. Stay close. Don't wander off. Yes, I see you. You're doing great. BE CAREFUL.
In crowded haul outs with thousands of walruses, a mother can identify her specific calf by voice alone. Her baby knows her call instantly. It's like having a dedicated phone line in the middle of the world's loudest, smelliest party.
And the protection? A mother walrus will take on a polar bear without hesitation. She'll place herself between her calf and any perceived threat other walruses, boats, humans, anything and make it abundantly clear that going through her is not an option anyone should consider seriously.
The calf, meanwhile, rides on mom's back in the water, nurses for nearly two years, and gradually learns the skills it needs. how to find food, how to navigate social situations, how to use those growing tusks, when to haul out, when to dive. It's an extended apprenticeship in being a walrus, taught by the one walrus who will never give up on you.
It's genuinely beautiful in a way that catches you off guard when you remember we're talking about animals that look like animated sandbags with dental problems.
The Love Songs of Awkward Giants
Male walruses during breeding season become underwater musicians, which sounds romantic until you actually hear what they're producing.
These "songs" are not melodious. They're not soothing. They're mechanical, repetitive sequences of knocks, bells, clicks, and whistles that sound like someone's trying to communicate via haunted plumbing. A male can keep this up for hours, floating vertically in the water with his inflated throat sacs keeping him upright, broadcasting his availability and quality to any females in the area.
Does it work? Apparently yes, which tells you something important about walrus attraction standards: It's not about being smooth or beautiful. It's about being persistent, loud, and unashamed to make weird noises in public for extended periods.
Honestly? Kind of inspiring.
The sounds serve multiple purposes attracting females, yes, but also establishing territory and warning off other males. It's a whole underwater conversation happening in a language that sounds like industrial machinery having an existential crisis.
And here's the thing. They're not just mindlessly making noise. Studies suggest these vocalizations have structure, variation, and individual signatures. Each male has his own style, his own repertoire. It's creative expression meets biological imperative, performed by a two ton animal with face tusks in the freezing Arctic Ocean.
Nature is weird, man.
The Problem We Created
Okay, we need to have the uncomfortable conversation now.
Walruses have been doing their thing the hauling out, the clam vacuuming, the awkward socializing, the terrible singing for about 17 million years. They've survived ice ages, climate shifts, and even extensive human hunting. They've proven themselves to be tough, adaptable, and remarkably resilient.
But they're not built for the speed of change we're throwing at them now.
Walruses depend on sea ice. Not as a nice-to-have, but as a fundamental part of their survival strategy. They rest on ice between feeding dives. They use it as a mobile platform to access rich feeding areas. They give birth on it. Their entire annual migration follows the advance and retreat of sea ice.
That ice is disappearing. Fast.
Arctic sea ice is declining at roughly 13% per decade. Summer ice that used to be reliable is now absent or distant. And walruses are being forced to make impossible choices.
Instead of small haul outs on ice, we're now seeing massive aggregations on land 30,000, 40,000, sometimes 50,000 animals crammed onto beaches that historically held a few hundred. The overcrowding leads to stampedes triggered by planes, boats, or polar bears. Calves get crushed. Weak or injured animals get trampled. It's chaos driven by desperation.
There's footage from Russia a few years back that's genuinely hard to watch. Walruses trying to scale cliffs because the beach below is so packed there's literally nowhere to go. Some fall. They die on impact. These are animals that evolved for ocean and ice, not mountaineering. They're not making stupid decisions they're trapped in an impossible situation we created.
And the worst part? They're still trying. They're still adapting, still showing up, still attempting to make it work in a world that's fundamentally changing beneath them.
What Makes a Walrus Worth Saving?
Here's my pitch. Walruses matter because they're proof that evolution doesn't optimize for beauty it optimizes for survival.
They're living evidence that you can be weird, awkward, ungainly, and equipped with features that seem almost comically impractical, and still be magnificent at what you do. They've taken a body plan that looks like a rough draft and turned it into mastery of one of Earth's harshest environments.
They're devoted parents. They're surprisingly social. They're intelligent, emotional, and capable of both tenderness and toughness. They can be gentle with their calves and fierce with threats. They've figured out how to live in massive groups without constant conflict. They've learned to find food in conditions that would kill most creatures.
And they ask for so little. ice to rest on, water to swim in, clams to eat, and space to just be the strange, wonderful animals they are.
But beyond all the practical reasons the ecological importance, the indicator species status, the role in Arctic food webs there's something else.
The world is better with weird things in it. It's richer, stranger, more interesting. And walruses are gloriously, unapologetically weird. They're proof that nature has a sense of humor and that sometimes the most unlikely combinations create something worth preserving.
The Last Word
I think about walruses sometimes when I'm feeling inadequate or out of place. When I'm convinced I don't quite fit, that I'm too much of this or not enough of that, that my particular combination of traits is somehow wrong for the world I'm trying to navigate.
And then I remember. There's an animal that weighs two tons, has teeth growing out of its face, uses its mustache to find dinner in the dark, and solves the problem of how do I get out of the water by stabbing ice with its face and dragging itself up.
That animal is thriving. Or was, until we started melting its home.
If walruses can make it work if they can take all that awkwardness and turn it into millions of years of success maybe there's hope for the rest of us strange creatures just trying to find our place.
We just need to make sure they still have a place to haul out when they need to rest.
Because a world without walruses isn't just a world with fewer species. It's a world with less proof that being different is exactly what makes you perfect.#walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL

You know that feeling when you walk into a party and immediately realize you're overdressed, underdressed, or just. dressed wrong? That's basically what a walrus looks like all the time, except the walrus has zero concern about it.
Picture this You're hauled out on an ice floe in the Arctic. The temperature is somewhere between "why" and absolutely not. You're shaped like a very large potato wearing a borrowed suit. You've got two massive teeth jutting out of your face at awkward angles. Your mustache looks like you glued a push broom to your upper lip. And you're surrounded by thousands of other potato shaped individuals who look exactly like you.
Do you care? Not even a little bit.
That's the walrus energy we all need.
The Beauty of Not Caring What You Look Like
Let's talk about walrus bodies for a minute, because they're fascinating in the way that a Picasso painting is fascinating nothing is quite where you'd expect it to be, but somehow the whole thing works.
Adult male walruses can tip the scales at 4,000 pounds. That's two literal tons of blubbery confidence. Females are slightly smaller at around 2,700 pounds, which is still roughly the weight of a compact car. They're shaped like overstuffed sausages that have been left in the sun too long. Their skin hangs in folds and wrinkles that suggest they're either melting or were assembled from spare parts.
And those tusks. Good lord, those tusks.
They grow continuously throughout a walrus's life, sometimes reaching over three feet long. Imagine having two giant teeth permanently sticking out of your mouth not in a cute vampire way, but in a I can't close my mouth properly and I'm fine with it way. You'd think this would be inconvenient. You'd be wrong. Walruses use these tusks for practically everything. hauling out of the water (hence tooth walking), making breathing holes in ice, fighting, showing off, and probably scratching itches in hard to reach places.
Then there's the color situation. Walruses can go from grayish brown to straight up pink depending on water temperature and blood flow. They're like enormous mood rings, except the mood is always temperature dependent vasodilation.
The Mustache That Actually Earns Its Keep
If you've ever met someone with a truly impressive mustache, you know there's usually some pride involved in its maintenance. The walrus has 400 to 700 whiskers forming what is arguably the animal kingdom's most functional facial hair, and it uses every single one.
These aren't decorative whiskers. These are highly sensitive, specialized tools called vibrissae, and they can detect vibrations, textures, and movements in pitch black water. A walrus feeding on the ocean floor in complete darkness is essentially reading the environment through its face.
Here's what that looks like in practice. A walrus dives down sometimes to depths where the pressure would make your ears explode. It's dark. It's cold. The seafloor is covered in mud, rocks, and hopefully clams. The walrus sweeps those magnificent whiskers across the bottom like someone searching for their phone that fell between the couch cushions, except the couch is the Arctic Ocean and the phone is dinner.
When it finds something promising, it blasts a jet of water from its mouth to excavate the clam, thenvand this is the really impressive part it creates a suction powerful enough to pull the soft body right out of the shell. The shell stays behind. The walrus gets exactly what it wants. It's like surgical precision performed by an animal that looks like it's never had a graceful moment in its life.
A successful feeding walrus can consume somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 clams in a single session. That's not eating. That's industrial processing.
The Complicated Social Life of Very Large Neighbors
Walruses are gregarious, which is a polite way of saying they have absolutely no concept of personal space.
They haul out in groups that can number in the thousands, all crammed together on ice floes or beaches like concert goers at a very cold, very smelly festival. They lie on top of each other. They lean against each other. They grumble and shove and occasionally stab each other with tusks when someone crosses a line. But mostly, they just exist together in a massive, blubbery pile.
It sounds chaotic, and honestly, it probably is. But there's a method to it. Huddling together conserves heat. Being in a group provides protection there's safety in numbers when you're worried about polar bears or orcas. And for young walruses, growing up in these massive groups is basically an extended education in how to be a walrus.
The social hierarchy is real, though. Bigger tusks generally mean higher status, particularly among males. Bulls will display their tusks to each other, posture, vocalize, and sometimes engage in full on combat that involves rearing up and striking with those ivory weapons. Most of the time it's just threatening displays the walrus equivalent of you want to take this outside?but occasionally things get serious.
Mothers, meanwhile, are dealing with their own challenges. Raising a walrus calf is a multi year commitment. Calves nurse for 18 months to two years, but they stay with mom for up to three years total, learning everything they need to know. And mothers are fiercely, almost violently protective. A mother walrus defending her calf is not something you want to be on the wrong side of. Even polar bears think twice.
The bond between mother and calf is one of the most touching things in nature. Mothers constantly vocalize to their babies a mix of grunts, whistles, and bellows that probably translate to some combination of stay close, be careful, and yes, sweetie, you're doing great.
Built Different (Literally)
Everything about walrus anatomy suggests that evolution was in a particularly creative mood.
That thick, wrinkled skin? It's covering a blubber layer that can be six inches thick a built in wetsuit and emergency food reserve that allows walruses to survive in water temperatures that would kill most mammals almost instantly. The blubber also makes them positively buoyant, which creates an interesting problem. How do you dive when you're essentially a giant, unwilling flotation device?
Walruses solve this by exhaling most of their air before diving, reducing buoyancy. Then they use powerful flippers to propel themselves downward. Their hind flippers, which can rotate forward, act like rudders and provide thrust. It's surprisingly graceful for an animal that looks like it should sink like a stone or bob like a cork with no in between.
And then there are the pharyngeal air sacsbasically internal flotation bladders in their throat that they can inflate to keep their head above water while they sleep. Imagine a pod of walruses sleeping vertically in the Arctic Ocean, bobbing gently like very large, mustachioed buoys. It's one of nature's more absurd solutions to the problem of how do I not drown while sleeping in the ocean?
The Sound of Walrus
If you've never heard a walrus, you're missing out on one of nature's stranger sonic experiences.
Walruses are vocal. Very vocal. They produce a range of sounds including bell like tones, knocks, clicks, barks, growls, and whistles. During breeding season, males become underwater performers, producing elaborate songs that can last for hours. These aren't beautiful whale songs. They're mechanical, otherworldly, almost alien like someone's playing a very strange instrument in a swimming pool.
Why do they do this? The usual reasons: attracting mates, warning off rivals, establishing territory. But the sheer effort involved suggests there's also an element of. showing off? Pride? The walrus equivalent of look what I can do?
Females and calves have their own vocalizations, which they use to stay in contact even in crowded, noisy haul outs. A mother can pick out her calf's voice among thousands. A calf knows its mother's call immediately. In the chaos of a massive walrus gathering, these vocal signatures are lifelines.
When Your Home Is Disappearing
Here's where we need to talk about the elephant in the melting room.
Walruses evolved in sync with Arctic ice. Their entire life strategy depends on it. They rest on ice between foraging dives. They use ice as a platform to access productive feeding areas. They give birth on ice. Their annual movements track the advance and retreat of the ice edge.
But Arctic ice is disappearing at a rate unprecedented in walrus evolutionary history. Summer sea ice extent has been declining by about 13% per decade. That's not an abstract statistic when you're a walrus whose survival depends on that ice.
The consequences are visible and heartbreaking. Walruses are being forced to haul out on land in massive numbers sometimes 30,000 or 40,000 animals on a single beach. These enormous congregations lead to deadly stampedes when the herd gets spooked. Calves are crushed. Animals are forced to travel much farther between resting areas and feeding grounds, expending energy they can't always afford to lose.
In 2019, footage emerged of walruses in Russia attempting to scale cliffs behavior that's completely unnatural for them simply because the beaches were so overcrowded. Some fell to their deaths. These weren't stupid animals making poor decisions. These were intelligent creatures trapped in an impossible situation, trying to survive in a world that's changing faster than they can adapt.
Why This Matters (Besides the Obvious)
Walruses are what scientists call an indicator species their health reflects the health of their entire ecosystem. When walruses struggle, it's a sign that something is seriously wrong in the Arctic.
But beyond their ecological role, walruses represent something important. They're proof that you don't have to be conventionally attractive, graceful, or built for speed to be successful. They're slow on land, awkward looking, and equipped with features that seem almost comically impractical. And yet they've thrived in one of Earth's harshest environments for millions of years.
They've figured out how to be social without losing their independence. They've learned when to fight and when to just coexist. They've mastered the art of being perfectly suited to their niche without trying to be anything else.
Until recently, that was enough.
The Walrus Philosophy
If there's a lesson in all this, maybe it's that being weird isn't a weakness it's often a strength. The walrus's strange features aren't design flaws; they're innovations. The same tusks that make them look ridiculous also make them uniquely capable. The same bulk that makes them awkward on land makes them powerful in water.
Walruses don't apologize for taking up space. They don't worry about looking ungainly. They just. exist, loudly and unapologetically, in all their wrinkled, mustachioed glory.
We could probably learn something from that.
We could also learn from the fact that even the toughest, most adapted creatures have limits. Walruses have survived for millions of years, but they can't survive the loss of their habitat. No amount of evolutionary perfection can overcome the simple fact that ice, once melted, makes for terrible resting platforms.
So maybe we owe it to them to these strange, wonderful, beautifully awkward survivors to make sure they still have somewhere to haul out when they need to rest.
Because a world without walruses would be a world with a little less character, a little less strangeness, and a lot less proof that being different is exactly what makes you perfect for where you belong.#walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL

If you've ever felt like you don't quite fit in, let me introduce you to your spirit animal.
The walrus is essentially what happens when nature throws darts at a design board. Massive body? Check. Comically oversized teeth sticking out of your face? Sure. A mustache that would make a Victorian gentleman weep with envy? Absolutely. The ability to turn pink like you're perpetually embarrassed? Why not.
And yet, despite looking like a rough draft that somehow made it to the final version, walruses are absolutely crushing it in one of the planet's most unforgiving environments.
The Introvert's Guide to Arctic Living
Walruses have mastered something most of us struggle with: knowing exactly when to be social and when to peace out. During certain times of year, they're the ultimate extroverts, piling onto beaches and ice floes in groups that can number in the tens of thousands. We're talking a density that would make a packed subway car look spacious.
But here's what's remarkable they've somehow figured out how to make it work. Sure, there's the occasional tusk jab when someone gets too comfortable, a grumpy bellow when a neighbor is snoring too loud, or a shoving match over a prime spot. But mostly, they just. coexist. Imagine if humans could pack thousands of people onto a small space without it devolving into chaos. Walruses have been doing it for millennia.
Then, when it's time to eat, they become solo artists. Each walrus descends to the ocean floor alone, methodically sweeping the darkness for dinner. No small talk required. No awkward hey, how's your day going? Just peaceful, productive alone time doing what they do best.
If that's not relatable, I don't know what is.
The Art of Being Genuinely Weird-Looking
Let's address the elephant seal in the room or rather, the walrus on the ice. They look absolutely ridiculous, and somehow they've turned it into their greatest asset.
Those tusks that make them look like they're perpetually wearing their Halloween costume? They're tools, weapons, status symbols, and ice axes all rolled into one. The name "walrus" might come from the Old Norse word meaning "whale horse," but their scientific name Odobenus rosmarus translates to "tooth walking sea horse," which is simultaneously more accurate and more hilarious.
Picture this: a 3,000 pound animal using its face teeth to drag itself out of the ocean and onto ice like some kind of blubbery mountaineer. It shouldn't work. It looks absurd. And yet it's so effective that walruses have been doing it for roughly 17 million years.
That ridiculous mustache? It's actually 400 to 700 highly sensitive whiskers that can detect the tiniest movements and textures on the pitch-black ocean floor. While other animals are fumbling around in the dark, walruses are reading the seafloor like Braille, finding clams with the kind of precision that would make a truffle pig jealous.
And those saggy, wrinkled skin folds that make them look like they're wearing a hand me down suit from a much larger relative? That's covering up to six inches of blubber a built in survival suit that keeps them alive in temperatures that would kill most creatures in minutes.
Dinner for One (Thousand)
Walruses are the competitive eaters of the shellfish world, except instead of hot dogs, they're downing clams, and instead of doing it in ten minutes, they can keep going for hours.
A single walrus can eat 3,000 to 6,000 clams in one feeding session. That's not a typo. They'll dive to the ocean floor sometimes 300 feet down feel around in the sediment with those magnificent whiskers, blast water from their mouths to uncover buried clams, and then vacuum out the soft parts with a suction so powerful it could probably unclog your drain.
They don't even swallow the shells. They're like the world's pickiest eaters, except instead of leaving vegetables on the plate, they're leaving thousands of empty clamshells scattered across the ocean floor.
The really mind-bending part? They do all of this in complete darkness, in near freezing water, while holding their breath for up to 30 minutes. Try eating anything in those conditions and see how well you do.
The Social Lives of Blubbery Giants
Despite their gruff appearance and the whole lying in piles of thousands thing, walruses are surprisingly emotional creatures.
Mothers are devoted to their calves in a way that's genuinely moving. A calf stays with its mother for two to three years an eternity in marine mammal terms. During this time, mom is constantly vocalizing to her baby, teaching it everything from how to find food to how to navigate the social complexities of walrus life. Shell carry her calf on her back in the water, protect it fiercely from predators including polar bears that really should know better, and generally be the kind of parent that would make helicopter moms look hands off.
Males, meanwhile, have developed an entire courtship ritual that involves producing underwater songs. And when I say "songs," I'm being generous. These are strange, mechanical sounding performances of clicks, bells, whistles, and knocks that can go on for hours. They're like a avant garde jazz musician who's also a 4,000 pound marine mammal trying to impress the ladies.
Does it work? Apparently yes, which just goes to show that confidence and persistence matter in the dating world, regardless of species.
Living in a World That's Literally Melting
Here's where things get heavy, and not just because we're talking about animals that weigh as much as a small car.
Walruses evolved to depend on sea ice. They rest on it between dives, they use it as a platform to access feeding areas, and their entire annual cycle is built around the presence of stable ice. But that ice is disappearing faster than at any point in walrus evolutionary history.
The result? Walruses are being forced to haul out on land in unprecedented numbers. In recent years, we've seen haul outs of 30,000 to 40,000 animals crammed onto beaches that historically would have held a fraction of that number. The overcrowding leads to stampedes that kill calves, forces animals to travel farther for food, and pushes walruses into terrain they're not designed for.
There's footage from a few years ago that's genuinely heartbreaking. walruses scaling cliffs because the beach below is so packed there's nowhere else to go, then falling to their deaths because their bodies so perfectly designed for ocean and ice aren't built for mountaineering.
These aren't dumb animals making mistakes. They're intelligent creatures trying to survive in a world that's changing faster than they can adapt.
Why We Should Care About Weird-Looking Ice Blobs
Because here's the truth: walruses are canaries in a very large, very cold coal mine.
They're indicators of Arctic health, key players in marine ecosystems, and perhaps most importantly they're fellow travelers on this planet who deserve to have a future. They've survived ice ages, climate shifts, and human hunting. They've evolved into something so specifically, perfectly adapted to their environment that they're masters of one of Earth's most extreme habitats.
And now that habitat is changing so fast that evolution can't keep pace.
But also? We should care because they're just. wonderful. Weird, yes. Awkward looking, absolutely. But also clever, devoted, social, and tough as nails. They're proof that you don't have to be conventionally beautiful or graceful to be magnificent.
So here's to the walrus: nature's weird uncle, the Arctic's most enthusiastic clam enthusiast, the animal that proves that sometimes the oddest-looking solution is exactly the right one.
We could all stand to be a little more walrus comfortable in our own wrinkled skin, devoted to our loved ones, and perfectly content to do our own strange thing regardless of what anyone else thinks.#walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL