Find, Tag, and Follow that Walrus!

BEST-BSIERP scientists managed to tag a few walrus on the first Healy cruise. Here is their story.

Excerpt from Plenty Magazine

"From a helicopter swooping low over the Bering Sea, Chad Jay spotted walruses resting on an expanse of sea ice and decided to go after one of them.

two walrus on ice The pilot dropped off Jay and his companions a good distance away so they could approach their quarry undetected. Drawing near, they paused to unload their equipment and ready their crossbow, and then began the final approach.

Suddenly, the large panel of ice the walrus was sitting on began to shift and drift away from the party. “It started taking our walrus away from us,” recalls Jay. “He went right into the water." Read Full Story

Tracking the Walrus

Chad Jay and his team attached satellite radio-tags to 10 adult walruses (both males and females) to map walrus foraging locations within the St. Lawrence Island polynya. The radio-tags characterize hourly walrus foraging status and provide animal location estimates for 6 to 8 weeks.

These data will be used with data from benthic samples collected in the same region to describe foraging effort by walruses relative to the distribution of their prey.

See an animation of where the walrus are right now

Hear an Alaska Public Radio interview with walrus researcher Tony Fischbach. "The entire population of Pacific Walrus gathers in the Bering Sea in the winter to breed, but that doesn't mean the animals are easy to find ..."

Read a USGS Fact Sheet on walrus and Arctic sea ice.