Protect Species Podcast
This podcast is a production of the Global Center for Species Survival, which is a partnership between the Indianapolis Zoo and the International Union for Conservation of Nature Species Survival Commission (IUCN SSC). We record all episodes at the Indianapolis Zoo in the Bedel Financial Media Studio, made possible by a generous gift from Elaine and Eric Bedel.
Protect Species Podcast
The Secret Lives of Walruses: a Conversation with Dr. Kit Kovacs
Ever wondered how a serendipitous encounter can shape an entire career? Join us on the Protect Species Podcast as we chat with Dr. Kit Kovacs, a distinguished marine mammal researcher, who recounts her enchanting journey from an undergraduate student to a leading expert at the Norwegian Polar Institute. Kit shares her first magical field season in Canada, where she fell in love with walruses and embarked on a lifelong mission to understand these magnificent creatures.
Discover the cutting-edge techniques and innovations that make walrus research possible as Kit reveals the complexities of tagging and monitoring these enormous animals. From the meticulous process of intubating and tracking oxygen levels to overcoming logistical challenges with Russian colleagues, Kit highlights the fascinating advancements and adaptations that enable researchers to gather critical data on walrus migration and behavior.
We also tackle the pressing conservation issues walruses face today, delving into the effects of climate change and the importance of sustainable hunting practices. Kit sheds light on the delicate balance between sea ice dependency and the species' adaptability to coming ashore. Plus, Kit shares heartwarming stories of close encounters with curious walruses.
If you like this episode, we'd love for you to rate and review the Protect Species Podcast! And, as is often the case, the highest form of praise you can offer is to tell others about our show.
Links:
The University Center in Svalbard
Norwegian Polar Institute
Dr. Kit Kovacs Google Scholar
IUCN SSC Marine Conservation Committee
They can weigh a ton, have impressive tusks and even star in a Beatles song. Today we're going on a magical mystery walrus tour with Dr Kit Kovacs. Kit is a marine mammal researcher with a passion for walruses, and it's a passion we think he will share by the end of our chat. I'm Moni Boehm.
Speaker 2:And I'm Justin Berkoff. Welcome to the Protect Species Podcast, where we celebrate biodiversity and converse with conservationists.
Speaker 1:So, Justin, the walruses are coming. They're coming back to the zoo.
Speaker 2:I know it's super exciting. They're one of the species here that are truly unique and that people absolutely love.
Speaker 1:So this should be a lot of fun. I mean, they're very similar to other walruses elsewhere in terms of their uniqueness.
Speaker 2:How are they unique? They're unique in the sense that they're not found in a lot of facilities here in the United States.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's exciting. I'm not originally from here. You can sometimes tell, can't you? Admittedly, I don't know a facility elsewhere that has walruses Walrye.
Speaker 2:I don't think it's walrye, I think it's walrus. It would be fun, though, wouldn't it? It would be fun, is it?
Speaker 1:walrus or walruses. Can you use both as plural?
Speaker 2:I think you can. I'm not going to stop you. Oh, thanks, that's good, but today we're going to talk to Dr Kate Kovac, who is a marine mammal researcher and specializes in walruses, so we're excited about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, also really good job. We picked the right person for this podcast.
Speaker 2:It's like we know what we're doing. Well done, Producer Kelly.
Speaker 1:Another good booking.
Speaker 2:Count that as a win Indeed.
Speaker 1:So let's get going.
Speaker 2:So, kit, we're going to start with the easy question Can you introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about who you are, what your job is and, if you're interested, maybe a little bit about how you came to be where you are now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, my name you've already got is Kit Kovacs, and I'm currently employed by the Norwegian Polar Institute as the Svalbard program leader. So I'm in charge of the scientific programs that are done by my institute on behalf of the Ministry of Climate and Environment in Norway. I'm also a professor of biology at University Studies on Svalbard, so I keep my two hats teaching and graduate teaching at the university and the science work for the ministry. And I have been doing this job for quite some time here in Norway. But prior to that I was a professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada, prior to that, a postdoc at University of Cambridge in England, prior to that, a PhD student at University of Guelph, which is really where a lot of this started, not specifically with walruses but with ice-loving pinnipeds. But my walrus experience goes back to my undergraduate days.
Speaker 3:The very first job I had in biology was for a professor at York University and the first half of the field season in the low Arctic in the Canadian north, not far from Churchill, manitoba, was working on shorebirds and a master's student was up there to work on shorebirds and I was there to help her and she unfortunately left her program. Things weren't going well and the professor was going north and he said well, I'm going north to work on walruses. Do you want to just stay with your contract and switch the topic? And I said gee, sure, I'd love to work on walruses. So we went up into Coates Island in the top of Hudson's Bay in Canada and spent some months with walruses and that was the first seal species that I had worked with in the top of Hudson's Bay in Canada and spent some months with walruses, and that was the first seal species that I had worked with and the first time I had spent any kind of serious time in the Canadian Eastern Archipelago. And I fell in love with a lot of things that summer, walruses being one of them.
Speaker 3:But I'm pretty passionate about all animals. Walruses are special of them. But I'm pretty passionate about all animals. Walruses are special. They certainly are special in part because of their intellect I guess we'll get into that at some point in this discussion but they are special because you make contact with them in a very special way because they're smart. But that whole summer I was 18, I guess and I suddenly learned that there was a world out there that you could work with animals in a way that I had never comprehended before. I mean, you read textbooks as a kid, but you don't read scientific papers and you don't really trace back at that age where knowledge comes from. It just comes from books, you know you don't think that people are out there creating it.
Speaker 3:So that summer I learned oh gee, this is a world that I really can link up with. And I knew I always knew I'd work with animals, but I thought I'd be a veterinarian. Like most young girls think the ponies and the veterinarians. I was that classical kid. But you learned, and I learned in that summer that well, there's a place in the world that you can work with animals that aren't sick, that you learn natural things about their world and you're actually part of it. And that was instantly infatuating for me and this is, this is what I needed to do, so that I mean, that's a wonderful answer what?
Speaker 1:what is it like? What was it like when you saw your first wild walrus? Because I mean, I mean, they're not small, right? Um, they're quite impressive beasts, um, I mean, I I would expect that if I saw one in the wild I would be absolutely blown away. But, um, what was it like?
Speaker 3:yeah, um, I wouldn't say that I had that reaction, of course, titillated at a new species, for sure, and and they are big. But we were kind of setting up a camp, getting established, established in tents and things. We had polar bear issues near walruses you often do, so there was a lot of complexity in meeting walruses close up for the first time when we do a bog down with the logistics.
Speaker 2:Really they're there but I got these other things I got to focus on right now.
Speaker 3:There's also a polar bear Like where's the gun?
Speaker 2:I mean that's a legitimate question. I love that your. Your entry into walrus is was an opportunistic question, right Like hey, I'm doing this thing. Do you want to join?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it absolutely was.
Speaker 3:It just came from for me, from heaven, through this opening to an opportunity to go further north, and it was the summer after my third year of university. So I was a modestly young undergraduate and I of course highly, highly privileged to be invited to go. But I guess it was because I was already pretty outdoorsy and a scholarship student and those things. I mean it wasn't by pure chance, but there was a lot of chance involved and it was absolutely fantastic. But the approach to walruses getting back to that, we had to, because walruses are hunted in Canada. They're quite shy of people and we had to put on overalls and roll around in walrus urine at the bottom that sounds at the bottom of the ooglick and then travel up toward the hollow like worms yeah, that stomach crawl yeah exactly.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, tummy hump, tummy hump, tummy, hump, up the uh walrus ooglick. But then when we were there, of course you just you're just hit with everything there are. There were hundreds of walruses. It was on coats island, on one of the most populated beaches, and big males up top and as you went down toward the water, more and more females with calves. And the smell is one of the things that struck me most. I mean the noise, because they're very vocal, they're very social, there's lots of action, there's always somebody lifting their tusks at somebody else and jostling for space and things. But the smell was the thing that hit me first, because it's intense and because smell was the thing that hit me first, because it's intense and because I was covered in walrus urine. You get a full nostril full and I've loved that smell always. And my husband and I have discussions about it because he says walruses stink and it's not true. Don't believe anyone that tells you that walruses stink.
Speaker 3:They have an aroma yes, a specific aroma and for me it's like a somewhat unkept horse barn. That wonderful, yeah, earthy, earthy smell there's a bit of like a fermented smell to it as well a little of ammonia in the background there, because they will roll around in their own urine sometimes too. But it is this wonderful. I mean, who doesn't full-on smell? I love it, I love.
Speaker 1:Should we bring it back from general olfactory? That's a good tangent, though, and things we may want to roll in to, maybe talking about walruses. Who's with me on this?
Speaker 2:Yes, let's do that.
Speaker 1:I mean they're obviously very big, large, charismatic animals. They've been covered in nature documentaries. We probably think we know a lot about walruses, walri walruses. I always get confused. I always like to put an I at the end of any plural, simply to be difficult, but I assume there's probably still a lot that science doesn't know yet about these species, these marine mammals. Can you tell us a little bit about what the big mysteries are about these wonderful creatures?
Speaker 3:I think that because they live in the environments where they do, in the very high north, where you have polar night for multiple months of the year, because they're very large animals, as you take note of, they're not the easiest animals in the world to work with. Logistically they're quite challenging, it's hard to get to where they live and then when you do get there they're big and challenging to handle. And when we started to work with walruses and svalbard and wanted to do bio bugging and tracking and learn more about their diving and learn more about where they go and whether we had one population or multiple populations in the northern barren sea and things we had to drug animals, and we called upon the expertise of a very, very talented vet here in Norway, that is, the vet for the primary zoo in Kristiansand, and he came up and refined a process that we had started, because with an opiate why you die is because you don't breathe, yeah, and for for a pinnacle, I mean they spend yeah, you have the dive response.
Speaker 2:You get the dive response.
Speaker 3:And if you drug, you don't know exactly where they are in in a dive cycle. When they're sleeping they dive too, at least they dive physiologically. So you don't know where in the dive cycle they are when you hit them and therefore you don't know how low their oxygen content is. And if you lose them because they don't come back out of this sleep apnea kind of response or dive response and it's because of a lack of oxygen. So we started intubating walruses and breathing for them.
Speaker 2:So the first couple of no small feet yeah, well, no big deal. When we started, we used that makes sense, yeah, and your hands will get tired and just like like watching for your horse or whomever.
Speaker 3:If you want to know whether or not they're oxygenated, you just lift the lips and if the lips are nice and pink then you're doing an okay job, and if they start turning blue then you don't have enough oxygen. So we did the zodiac pump thing for the first year and we thought this has to be like it worked. It worked beautifully. We didn't lose a walrus and they were lovely pink lips. They recovered rapidly, all of that. But it's incredibly hard on the legs to zodiacal walrus for half an hour and we thought it has to be more refined than this. I mean, there has to be a better way. So we called this friend who is a vet and and he's an expert in all kinds of exotic animal anesthesia Anesthesia is his primary thing and he came up in oxygen tanks and better intubation methodologies and really smoothed the process. And he also encouraged and introduced an automatic reversal agent so that when we deliver the opiate we very, very shortly after deliver the recovery drug which we weren't using before. We were allowing them to recover on their own.
Speaker 3:So now it's going magically and smoothly and we've drugged probably 80 walruses with the new methodology and we've never lost a walrus and never came close to being afraid that we were going to lose a walrus. That's phenomenal and we did the tagging and have learned a lot about site fidelity and movement patterns and things that actually yesterday we just resubmitted a manuscript on the longest records that we've ever had in the world on walruses. We developed a tag. Everything you have to start from ground one, all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's the, it's the theme in wildlife, veterinary science and ecological sciences like there's a, there's a tool that's close to what you need, but it's never exactly what you?
Speaker 3:yeah, and a species specific thing walruses don't react like any of the other pinnipeds, to drugs, for example, and they're also extremely tough on gear. They are really tough on gear. They. If you put a tag on them somewhere, they will rub it off. If it's on their skin, if it's glued on or something, it's history, they're going to get it off.
Speaker 3:So we use a tusk mount and even that we had to go to titanium and we had to have special flanges that protect the gear and things. And we were working initially in the program where we did the big tagging efforts with Russian colleagues, and their government wouldn't allow foreign-designed tags to send data to satellites because they wanted control of the entire data stream, and so we designed a tag with SIRTRAC that reported to stations, so the numbers returned to areas and the stations downloaded the tag, so our Russian colleagues could control the tag and control the data streams, and that because it isn't shooting data to the satellite and just to a land-based station. The batteries last a long time. So we have records of walruses, individual walruses, without re-tagging in excess of six years.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's absolutely phenomenal.
Speaker 3:Yeah, really, really cool data and they are extremely site-specific. Each walrus does his own thing. We only tagged males because we have very few females in our population and there's a great sensitivity about diddling with any of the girls, so we're only allowed to tag boys because they're 95% of our population. But each boy does his thing in a very, very precise way. He leaves on migration from Svalbard, where they spend the summer foraging and haul out on land. They go across towards Franz Josef Land to join up with the girls and they perform very, very, very different behavior when they're there. In terms of diving behavior, they go into these mating display things and aren't diving to the bottom for foraging and things like they do in Svalbard. But each guy leaves at the same time, goes to the same place, comes back the following summer, anywhere between two and three months later, and he has that pattern. He does that. He does the same thing every year and comes back precisely to where he was last year. Wow.
Speaker 3:And from the different sites we see some few general patterns. In the south the Svalbard they leave a little later than in the north, which is a little counterintuitive, but they do it consistently. But the southern guys do their own thing and come back to their own areas. So extreme site fidelity that we had never guessed at this level before. We had little hints of it from a previous tagging effort where we had tags last a little bit more than a year and guys came back to the same general area and we thought, wow, is this a general pattern? And for our walruses in Svalbard at very least, it is a very consistent pattern. And for our walruses in Svalbard at very least it is a very consistent pattern. High, high, high degrees of individuality, but very, very site-fidel from one year to the next, to the next, to the next to the next. So we're learning things. It's just with walruses sometimes you have to work a little harder on getting the P6.
Speaker 2:In part because they haven't been worked on so much as other pinnipeds. I mean, as you mentioned, you know you have the ability to get to them the back, the fact that gear is hard to put onto them, like there's so many roadblocks to get like good information yeah, you need decent funding because logistics aren't easy.
Speaker 3:You have to get up to these sites, have permission to work on them and then figure out the logistics, not of the camps and things, those are easy but the logistics of dealing with the walruses, the the basics with drugging and things. We're telling the community we have a solution. Don't give up. Yeah, try it. Use these methods. We've published them. That will tell anybody the details as they say. They are published. So people can. People can do it. It's out there for if you like.
Speaker 1:If you like a career in problem solving um work on walruses, yeah really you have to hang in there.
Speaker 3:It's a step at a time and you have to design things that work for this species, but they have wonderful things. Wonderful things like tusks that you can set.
Speaker 2:There are some advantages.
Speaker 1:Can I quickly ask about the tusks actually? I read somewhere and I kind of love this. Sorry, this is a complete sidebar that they're. It's not a complete sidebar because it's. Walrus related, but that they're scientific. Their Latin name translates to tooth-walking seahorse. They do Go to venice. That's amazing. That's what I'm going to call them from now on. What walruses you mean? Tooth walking seahorses?
Speaker 3:that's too cool if you see them in the field, and especially when they're around ice, you see why they got that. I mean, they use their tusks pretty actively to get up onto ice and if they're moving around on ice and snow covered services, then they use their tusks quite a lot. They don't feed with it like ski poles really sorry, like ski poles, yeah, maybe or crampons, or they use their tusks a lot and they do seem to walk on their teeth when they're pulling themselves up onto ice pieces. They don't do it on land much. They then they're like the little turbo worms that we were when we were on Cotes Island. They just hump or walk. When they're little they can walk because they can lift their body weight up on their hip on their back legs so that they have their hips up. Little walruses walk on all four legs, but big walruses move the front and catch up with the back and then move the front and then catch up with the back and then move the front and then catch up with the back.
Speaker 2:So we had Steve Amstrup on earlier and one of the questions we asked him was about weighing polar bears, because it was a big part of their monitoring and gathering ecological data. How do you weigh a walrus?
Speaker 3:Well, we haven't weighed walruses because there is good curves for walruses for length and girth, so you can get weight from body measurements. Okay, quite accurately from them, from all the killed walruses in their places. Our walruses are totally protected in Svalbard after a historical grotesque overhunting, so we don't take any chances with so there's.
Speaker 2:So there's using using animals that have been killed or are you know from other locations you're able to extrapolate out correct and with length and growth. Okay, that makes sense so.
Speaker 3:So we don't do the block and tackle thing very often for them. We have enough other animals that we have to do it for things like bearded seals and things this podcast is a production of the global center for species survival of indianapolis.
Speaker 2:We record all the episodes in the beetle financial media studio, made possible by a generous gift from eric and elaine beetle.
Speaker 1:Okay, we already kind of touched on it a little bit in our chat so far, but walruses are listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. What does that mean and why are they vulnerable?
Speaker 3:Okay, I don't think we need to get into all of the ins and outs of classifications on the red list, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Just just for you know, the red, the highlight.
Speaker 3:For me the red list is a little um traffic control mechanism, or red green, yellow or red yellow, green Um, it is a warning system for the risk of losing species. So if they're on the red list at all, it's something to worry about. If they're at vulnerable, then it means that there's a problem with either population decline or a very serious concern that they're going to decline in the next interval. And we use three generations within the IUCN as the time interval that you're reflecting on. So for walruses in the next 35, 40 years, what is the likelihood of risk? And that's what you're assessing with those redness designations. And for walruses, most populations on my side of the world, the Atlantic populations, have been really, really overharvested and some up until very recently still being overharvested. And thankfully Canada and Greenland have done a lot of work recently, through the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission in part, but by their own governments as well, to recognize that both countries were harvesting from the same population when they were seasonally moving around and without taking that into account, count. So folks who are over-harvesting accidentally by not knowing about the movement patterns of the walruses. And they've sorted that out and everybody is now hunting sustainably but populations have been depressed by over-harvest. That's one concern. A new concern, and one that for the population that I work with in Svalbard and Franz Josef Land, is the risks posed by climate change, and that is related to the amount of habitat they're going to have in 20 years and the amount of food that they're likely going to have in 20 years. And with the changes that we've seen in the last 30 years, the situation is worrisome.
Speaker 3:Walruses depend on sea ice, primarily in the wintertime. They breed on sea ice and they give birth on sea ice, but they're one of the Arctic seal species that will actually come ashore. They do come ashore naturally and quite readily in the summertime when the sea ice isn't available near areas where they have food. If land is available, that's okay for walruses, so that's cool. But if you're stuck on land all the time and you can only reach so far to make feeding at a spot energetically worthwhile, then you're going to have a lot less walruses supported by only land, whereas when the whole of the Arctic Ocean and the largest part of the coastal Arctic seashells is covered, then you've got a lot of area where walruses can spread out and feed. If you're concentrated on land, fewer walruses are going to be able to support themselves.
Speaker 3:And then there's a lot of other risks with climate warming. I mean, walruses are cold adapted so they're physiologically stressed when they get too warm. You guys know that at the zoo you have to keep water cold and make it conditions that they're comfortable in. Even though they do like to bask in the sun, sometimes they have to recool.
Speaker 3:But another big concern is that right now the coastal shelves, the ocean shelves around the circumpolar Arctic, most of which are really shallow, have been sea ice covered over almost all of their extent in the wintertime. And then in the spring you've got this melt and retraction that sweeps northward. That sweeps northward and as it sweeps northward the currents in the water passing through the polar fronts and things come up against the ice edge and lift nutrients from the bottom up toward the top. So you get these amazing plankton blooms, and where you have plankton blooms and primary productivity you have secondary productivity. So you have lots of invertebrate fauna, you have fish fauna, you have lots of action along the ice edge, and then things are happening so fast that when the ice is melting a lot of that production drops to the seafloor. It's going so fast that it can't be captured by the pelagic community.
Speaker 3:Well, when the ice isn't over the shelf seas to the degree that it is now and there's much less ice and it's much less thick, you're not going to have that sympagic fallout, that fallout from the sea ice community. So a huge source of food for benthic animals is gone and walruses are benthic feeders. They need these wonderful bivalve beds. They're big animals, as you mentioned, and they eat a lot. I mean they eat a normal amount for a mammal. So imagine your body extrapolated up to a ton, ton and a half. They need a lot of food. They need to eat a lot of these bentic bivalves.
Speaker 2:So if production is down and it's not going to be enough food for all horses, yeah, I mean, when you think about the climate change portion of it, often sea ice is the first part of it, but sea ice plays such a pivotal role in this huge circular system of nutrients and how that impacts not only their ability to find ice to be on and where they able to go to to forage for food, but also what level of availability of that food is. You know, it is this massive system and we often it's easy to think about just one piece of it and how. How this impacts not only bivalves or, you know, mollusks or clams, mussels, those sorts of things, but how that impact. You know what that downstream portion of it is is quite, I mean, it's a lot to think about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and how all the timings shift. Yeah, Suddenly everything's much more rapid and then it's gone. Yeah, it's fascinating and depressing at the same time A little bit.
Speaker 2:So one of the other questions with this you mentioned is, you know, this massive offtake or harvest of walruses. Are we seeing impacts from overfishing or large fishing communities? Is that impacting walruses specifically or are we seeing that kind of tumble down as well?
Speaker 3:tumbled down as well. Most of the commercial level fishing in in my world is on pelagic species and fish species. The invertebrates that are taken are are largely shrimp in our part of the world, which are not part of the walrus's diet, and the favorite food for walruses in our area is really dominated 80 90 percent of the diet is one species and it's called maya truncata and it's a an in faunal living bivalve mollusk with a very big fleshy foot, and walruses just love them and eat them in vast quantities and that's not a commercial species. So it isn't a direct thing with fisheries.
Speaker 3:Walruses don't tend to be bycatch in fisheries but all of the ship traffic, including fisheries traffic, poses risks of its own. I mean walruses are an extremely acoustic species and our oceans are getting noisier and noisier and polar oceans have been protected from human anthropogenic sound because of its ice cover. Well, as our ice cover has really been dramatically reduced in recent years. You have a lot more fisheries moving north, you have tourism moving north, you have shipping moving north, you have interest in mining moving north, you have tourism moving north, you have shipping moving north, you have interest in mining moving north, and all of that increases ocean noise and risk of oil spills, risks of other forms of pollution. So ship traffic is also a growing concern for all of us.
Speaker 1:That's a lot it is a lot that's a lot. It is a lot, um, which probably brings me to kind of um getting myself out of my immediate depression about the state of of um, how walruses are doing before we do that, let's do one more.
Speaker 3:Yes, and that's disease. Oh okay, as, as our arctic is warming, animals that have been basically living in a disease-free zone, because viruses and bacteria really don't like cold as our world is warming and sea ice is declining, are all of our arctic endemics, including walruses, are at greater risk of disease, and we last year documented the first ever avian flu death of a walrus. Walruses in our part of the world don't hesitate to nibble on seabirds, and when there's dead seabirds laying on the water, like there was last fall, for the first time in our experience, that's an opportunity.
Speaker 3:It's an opportunity and they eat them, and then they get infected with the virus, and then the ones that die and wash up on shore are eaten by polar bears, which is a good way to transfer the virus up the chain. And diseases should not be overlooked when we're talking about climate change. We just did a big review with a handful of colleagues last year and it is very concerning the things that we have to think about now compared to what we had to think about 20 years ago in the Arctic, because of the temperature, for one thing water temperatures, air temperatures but also because of the increased contact between southern species and northern species. These guys have been isolated before because they were in ice and the other guys weren't, and now that ice isn't there and our southerly species our boreal or atlantic or whatever you're going to call them are coming up and overlapping the ranges of the arctic species, and those guys have been exposed to disease for a long time. They have antibodies against them. They've had exposure over hundreds of generations.
Speaker 3:Well, the Arctic guys haven't, so they have antibodies against them, so they can get the word and specific to walruses if a walrus is sick he's in the gang, so the whole gang can be infected. They're so social and they're so tactile that disease is a big concern for those guys okay, so as I tumble further down my, my big dark hole um kit.
Speaker 1:What gives you hope um in your work?
Speaker 3:well, I guess I classify myself as an eternal optimist, or I wouldn't be able to work in the conservation field at all.
Speaker 1:It helps yes.
Speaker 3:Because you can't go into the hole. You have to avoid going into the hole, especially when the times get tough. When the times get tough, the tough get going and you need to speak to it. You need to mitigate where it's possible to mitigate. You need to make people aware of the risks. You need to put in management policies where possible to protect the species that are at increasing risk. I mean, we're the source of this problem, we're the source of anthropogenic warming and we have every responsibility to try to protect other species that are being impacted by it.
Speaker 2:So, with that, what does the average person, which is a terrible term what can people do? That's me. I'm average, You're so average. What can people do to support walruses?
Speaker 3:Yeah, they can certainly, in your part of the world, talk to their congressman about climate change and the impact it's having on animals and that it's not appreciated that we're doing these things and be willing to take the hits on some aspects of lifestyle and industry that would be necessary to slow climate warming. And if we managed to hit the paris agreements for whatever which one you want to talk about, whether it's two degrees of warming or 1.5 degrees of warming or whatever and unless we stand up and try to start hitting those targets in a meaningful way and rich countries stop buying themselves out of the targets, then we have to stop the spiral. Basically, we have to slow climate change and, ideally, stop climate change. We still have 40 years, I'm told by my physical science colleagues, of continued warming. If we stopped it tomorrow, we'd still be dealing with increasing warming for the next 30 to 40 years. But if we don't stop it tomorrow, then you're only postponing and exacerbating the problem.
Speaker 3:So, of course, hunt sustainably, if you're going to hunt at all, and control things that human activities you can control, and don't allow huge volumes of ship traffic in areas that are sensitive and have sensitive animals, sensitive to sound, sounds, sensitive to oil pollution, I mean oil spills and things, especially heavy oil spills, are a real risk for walruses I anything that would contaminate benthic areas would be disastrous on large scales for walruses. So there are things we can control, and mostly it's us. Mostly it's controlling our own behavior, but at high levels. I mean. Individual people need to be collective in their thinking and encourage their governments to be responsible, especially with industry.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thank you so much. To turn it back onto a bit more of a joyful finish, do you have any fun stories that you can share with us about your work with these um, tooth-walking seahorses, as I will call them now? Um, what's? You mentioned already that they're they're super intelligent. Have they ever outfoxed you? Any fun, fun stories about that?
Speaker 3:and we don't work with them in the way that they would be able to do that. Very much. Well, because our walruses aren't afraid of people at all. In svalbard we have this amazing population that has been totally protected since 1952 and they don't recognize people as anything to worry about.
Speaker 3:So even quite high levels of tourism, as long as the tourists are behaving themselves, the walruses show no signs of disturbance, which which is which creates this wonderful place where people can see walruses without disturbing them, which I promote all the time, because, my god, what a wonderful thing to share with the world walruses that are wild and basically don't care about you, and as long as you behave sensibly, at least with a gram of common sense, you don't disturb them.
Speaker 3:They don't care about you and as long as you behave sensibly, at least with a gram of common sense, you don't disturb them. They don't care. So in terms of magical moments, I think one of the most most fun things that I've ever experienced with walruses is being close to the hollows and just sitting down by the water. We never approach approach them unless we're with permits, drugging them and attaching instruments and things, but if you let them approach you, that's one of the coolest things that I experienced with walruses If you go down by the water, but safely enough that they can't reach you if they come ashore, because they're big and they're curious and often their curiosity leads to them poking you don't want to be.
Speaker 3:That makes sense yeah, but let them just let them come to you on on their own terms and often, especially if there's a few youngsters in the group, they will come very close and that is absolutely fascinating because they're making contact with you, they're eye-to-eye contact and you'll have this you know a ton and a half animal and a one ton animal and maybe a guy that weighs 800 kilos, and they're all woo-hoo, woo-hoo Because they're so excited about getting close to this foreign object. They know you're alive. Of course they know you're alive, but they're very, very, very curious about your stuff and you and that. That lights up my heart, I have to admit it lights up my heart when they're actually taking the time to to make that kind of of social contact with you.
Speaker 3:We have let them sometimes in the past, because they are so curious, come up to boats and things, but they'll, and I think it's one of the most fabulous moments with walruses they have, um, the most highly innovated whiskers in the world and there's some wonderful work by a guy by the name of chris marshall who's done this stuff on innovation of walrus whiskers and they can move whiskers almost independently of each other, so it's like little. There's a few clusters, but for the most part they're independent. And so you've got this network of feelers on the front of their faces and they love to touch with it. And some wonderful experimentation done by a german scientist Denhard, I believe, is his name, but it's a German scientist working with walruses in captivity. He designed experiments to determine how small objects could be with them detecting shapes, and he had blindfolds, he had suction cup things that went over their eyes and let them touch shapes like to picture that it's amazing yeah they're very interactive, they're very curious, they're very smart, they're very trainable.
Speaker 3:So it's actually castellan. I think they did this, but he kept shrinking the object size. He had a circle, a square and a triangle and he taught you you nod when you have a circle and you shake your head, you have a square, so he could differentiate what shape that they were feeling down to three millimeters with just a whisk, no vision, amazing millimeters.
Speaker 3:they can feel what shape. It is so fantastic, fantastic sensory organs and when they use them, it is so amazing to see Like this. The only problem is, after they've felt it that way, then they think, hmm, let's feel it this way, then they're going to poke it.
Speaker 2:Those are very dainty, very not.
Speaker 3:Don't do that to my camera, don't do that to my studio, but the initial stuff, that feeling in the curiosity, is absolutely amazing. Occasionally they cause a little bit of trouble for us, um, in the field. We've had them come up under the zodiacs and come through the zodiacs with their tusks. Yeah, when they've been alarmed, when we haven't known, and and the first time it happened to us it was a female with a calf. So she was just being a really good mom, but we didn't know she was a bear, let alone that she had a calf. And suddenly she was just up under the boat and punctured the boat, and that's not the easiest thing to fix out in the field, so we had to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, zodiacs are wonderful boats For the people. People aren't familiar. It's an inflatable boat, right? So they're very light, they're very maneuverable, but they're made of tusks. They're not super robust, so like they're not going to protect you from a lot of things, particularly a very large animal with with tusks that are going to come, who's motivated to come up underneath?
Speaker 3:you and walruses sometimes can just be grumpy and I mean, can't we all seriously can't? We all, can't we all? But sometimes they're just grumpy for no identifiable reason. I mean, we've had oh, I know people who are like that as well. We've had big males chase after the sailboat because we we tow a zodiac and hacking at the zodiac behind a sailboat and you just think, okay, so you're having a bad day, please leave that zodiac alone yeah, they're not cheap they're not.
Speaker 3:You don't even, as I say, they're hard to repair in the field.
Speaker 2:So that you know you go out for two months and you need that zodiac you know, I want to say, because this is a non-visual medium, right Like the smile on your face, since you've started telling this story about sitting down at the water line and having animals come up close and the vibrancy, you know, the whiskers getting close and all of that like is infectious, because all of us are have this giant smile on our face. It sounds like a truly magical way to interact with this species that is incredibly unique, found in, you know, some some of the harshest environments that we experienced in the world. Like it's. It's wonderful to see so much joy and when, when you talk about this animal, you're passionate about that. You've been studying since you were 18.
Speaker 3:I'm sure you guys at the zoo have amazing relationships with the walruses that you have in captivity. We do. I see them as little emissaries to the public, because it's easier for most folks to get to the zoo than it is to get to the arctic, and I I've seen walruses in captivity in the zoos and that they're very much like in the wild. They're they're curious, they're interactive incredibly very bonded with their trainers.
Speaker 3:And, yeah, smart learn basically anything you want to teach them if you have the right way of getting them interested in the lesson. I think that that's very true. You have that with all the animals. You have to discover the key that makes something important to them and and when you have that, then smart animals learn, and wallies are smart, for sure.
Speaker 1:I for one can't stop smiling. Now, and it brings me back to our introduction. I think the passion that you have for these walruses really did shine through, and I think we have shared that with our listeners, which is wonderful. Thank you so much for talking with us today, Kit. You're very welcome and I hope all your gear holds up and that you have many more magical moments of connection with your walruses.
Speaker 2:Thank you. We appreciate the time, knowing that your field season is coming up and you're you're prepping for that. So we we really appreciate you taking the time to sit down and chat with us about about walruses, about what you love about them and the things that they're facing in the world.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's my pleasure. We're headed off to narwhals, so another species about which it's easy to be passionate.
Speaker 2:Yes, oh yeah that's a whole new podcast episode maybe, maybe we'll have to bring you back after your field season.
Speaker 3:Anytime.
Speaker 2:Excellent. Thank you so much, Kit. You have a lovely rest of your day.
Speaker 3:You too.
Speaker 1:Don't forget to subscribe to the Protect Species podcast to ensure you're the first to know when new episodes are available, and please follow us on social media. We're on Facebook, instagram and X. Also, if you like what you hear, we'd love if you left us a review, which apparently makes us more popular. That's all I ever wanted and also, obviously, helps people find us.
