I just read this fascinating article about Walruses in The New York Times. Turns out, beneath the three inches of blubber, these little buddies are pretty darn smart-- and cuddly! The scientist in the article refers to them as "pussycats." Apparently, they like it when you blow in their faces. In kittycats, that makes them swallow which is helpful when giving them meds.Four things I learned from the article follow.
1. The whiskers are called vibrissae, and they use them to find food through the "seabed’s dark murk."
2. The walrus is the only living representative of the family Odobenidae, which means that they walk with their teeth. They use their tusks to pull themselves up out of the water onto icesheets.
3. Walruses can "sing nonstop for days at a time, and their songs can be heard up to 10 miles away. " (Maybe my next door neighbor with the loud music is really a walrus? Next time I see him, I'll blow in his face.)
4. A walrus eats a "huge numbers of bivalves, maybe 7,000 a day. " That's alot of clams.
4 comments:
"They have such incredible muscular control over their entire snout area, Dr. Reichmuth said, “that if you drop a little piece of fish on the whiskers away from the mouth, they can walk it along the whiskers, across the muzzle and into the mouth.”
I wish I could do that with whiskers!
Mooses?
Walruses are like arctic sea mooses. The name means, in its original language, "moose who bathes in cold sea with whiskers."
Once at the Coney Island Aquarium I saw a Walrus giving himself personal pleasure. It was horrifying and fascinating at the same time. And, humbling.
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