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Walruses trampled as a result of climate change -- no, seriously

Posted at 3:06 PM on 14 Dec 2007

Here's a climate-change impact you don't think about every day: trampled walruses. When walruses get tired of swimming, they clamber onto sea ice to rest. As ice is in increasingly short supply above the Arctic Circle, walruses are huddling on shore in extremely high numbers. And as the tusky animals are liable to stampede at the appearance of a polar bear, hunter, or low-flying airplane, more than 3,000 walruses are estimated to have been trampled to death by their panicky brethren this past year. Let that be a lesson to us all. Or something.

source: Associated Press

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Comments: (3 comments)

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Natural Selection

So, what? We can give the Darwin Award to all the walruses that are too slow or stupid to get out of the way.

What will be left is a tribe of Super-Walruses. Walruses so smart they can descend into the Temperate and Tropical Zones to set up cabanas and overtake the travel and tourist industry in a few short vacation seasons.

Now is that what you want??

by jabailo at 10:56 AM on 15 Dec 2007

Nice title

After a few years of reading your witty titles I've learned to predict them in advance :-)

http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2007/12/i-was-walrus.html

by biggav at 7:40 PM on 15 Dec 2007

what the trampling may mean

To go by what the Russian expert said, it is normal for there to be competition among walruses for space at their "haulouts"; and it is normal that when the whole group is sent into a panicked rout into the sea, some of the smaller and slower individuals get run over. ("Run over" is probably better than "trampled," since it is not a question of legs and feet that are treading on the victims, but of entire massive blubbery bodies, pressing the smaller ones in their way down against the shingle.) The relatively high death rate of young individuals is common enough in many animals, and the high number of deaths reported in the past year does not seem to be itself weird and anomalous. These recent episodes of big run-overs are not in themselves serious threats.

What is more important, though, is the observation that walruses have congregated at fewer "haulouts," for longer periods of time, indicating that other places of resort were no longer available. I.e., as the ice disappears, the range of the walruses effectively shrinks. Too many walruses concentrated in too few places for too long will result, first, in their excessive, unsustainable consumption of local shellfish, and other possible prey items; and then, in the local extinction of those prey items; and then, in a great die-off, possibly a local extinction, of the walruses too.

The song from the Beatles' acid period is just one of many references to walruses in popular culture. A classic of children's verse is Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter." When we enjoy those works of art, we rather assume that there will always be walruses, and that we will always be able to see a walrus, at some point or other.

Thomas Friedman has just written a simple little essay, making the point that the sense of "later" is over. If we thought that the world, and the community of living creatures that reside in it, will be there for a long time, and if we have not met them yet, there will always be time to do it "later," well, we would be wrong: more and more of them will be leaving us, forever, very soon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/opinion/16friedman.html ...

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 1:19 AM on 16 Dec 2007

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