Animal Face-off: Polar Bear vs. Walrus - July 7

With AoS on the leave until September, my blog suffers from a small hiatus of reviews. There were River Monsters, but, sadly, they have jumped the metaphorical shark – the last season, (one of the shortest ones yet), was committed to ‘mysteries of the deep’…

Okay, make no mistake – JW is still the man, and RM is still heads ahead of the swill that had been aired on ‘Shark Week’, for example, but compared to the previous seasons, ones that were focusing on proper fishing rather than something reminiscent of MonsterQuest, (which wasn’t a bad show in itself, but RW is still the better one), RM has certainly jumped the shark…and left the rivers for the ocean. It should rename itself, then, since it no longer deals with the rivers, and other bodies of freshwater, eh?

…That said, the main issue with the S8 of RM is the abruptness and shortness of the season – clearly it is not as popular as it once was, and perhaps it is time to end it, on a high note, before it is ended on a low one instead – but we got distracted. There are other good shows airing on the TV at the moment – the first season of ‘Preacher’, the second season of ‘Killjoys’ and of ‘Dark Matter’, the latest season of ‘Mistresses’ – but none of them are so intense as AoS, or AC (‘Agent Carter’) had been, which, considering that AoS isn’t all that great itself lately, is just sad.

(Of course, this isn’t just the TV – the movies too seem to suffer from something similar, and lately they are even scrapping their plans for various sequels, they are trying to achieve something original…so, we’ll have to see how it works.)

In any case, while I have been enjoying the new shows, I still went out to look for some old favorites of mine, including AFO, (‘Animal Face-Off’). It was a very good show back in the 2004, and certainly no less, (and no more) scientific than ‘Shark Week’ had been, for example. (And still is – ‘Shark Week’, that is). Sadly, after a single season, it got cancelled, but that is another story – you can still see it online even now, so let us not bitch too much about it.

Therefore, the episode I watched today was ‘Polar Bear vs. Walrus’, and the polar bear lost. Why? AFO, (being the sort of show that it was), has actually given the answer, (indirectly), to its audience, especially to those who had been paying attention to all the experiments done on (any given) episode.

What is a polar bear? It is a predator, a mammal of the order ‘Carnivora’. As such, basically, it is a typical carnivore, with teeth-studded jaws and powerful paws, armed with formidable claws. Like other bears (brown and black, for example), it uses paws to subdue its prey and teeth and jaws to dismember and eat it. If you compare skulls of a bear, (regardless if it is polar, grizzly, or black), and a weasel (short-tailed, long-tailed, etc.), and some other carnivore (or even their relatives, fur seals and sea lions), the skulls will be quite similar, especially if you look pass the differences in sizes and size-related differences. (This fact hints at the fact that weasels and bears are related to each other, however distantly, but we are not talking biological classification now.)

Put otherwise, a polar bear has a standard tool kit of a carnivore, not counting its’ size and strength. A walrus has not. It has a very different kit - one that is suited for defence, including against polar bears in question.

Technically, a walrus is a pinniped, not a carnivore, but the two orders of mammals are closely related to each other, BTW. Diet-wise, a walrus would eat shellfish and similar creatures rather than anything else, but in the past, there was some (anecdotal) evidence of orphaned walruses growing up to be more active hunters – of seals and similar sea life. I.e., it does have some mental hardware to be as formidable as a polar bear is, and perhaps even more so.

Moreover… as it was said before, the polar bear is a typical carnivorous mammal; it is also the biggest carnivorous mammal on Earth in the modern times and it is the top mammalian predator in the Arctic (not counting the killer whale, but the killer whale doesn’t live in the Arctic all the time – the polar bear does). It preys mostly on seals, but it will eat anything else, from the lemming (a small, vole-like rodent of the north) to the walrus in question – and everything else, alive or dead, in between. Sometimes it even captures the belugas and the narwhals – a northern species of toothed whales… The walrus has evolved precisely to stand-up to it. It has specifically evolved to be powerful enough to fend-off a polar bear – the big size, the thick armor of blubber, and the tusks: the polar bear’s presence was a powerful factor in the walrus’s evolution.

Yes, the evolution went both ways, and the polar bear, especially in theory, can take down a walrus…but it would rather eat something else. A ringed seal, or a harp seal, or a bearded seal…for example, not a walrus. Anything else but a walrus, really. And when the polar bear does charge a walrus, it is usually a cow or a calf – not a bull in its prime, as it was on AFO. A fight between a polar bear and a walrus is a long and exhaustive affair, unlike what AFO has shown, and moreover, the walrus has a better motivation (usually) - it is fighting for its like, unlike the polar bear...until the last few decades, when the global warming changed everything. 

…To add injury to insult, AFO has shown a polar bear hunt a walrus live, from footage that would later shown, (in 2006), on David Attenborough’s ‘Planet Earth’ TV series. There, a polar bear did attack a walrus – and the walrus got away, while wounding the polar bear very badly in the process (it died later on). I.e., polar bears tend to attack walruses only from desperation, and usually they lose. Usually, because lately the global warming had hit both them and walruses very badly; with the pack ice melting, both animals are being increasingly driven to the shoreline, where the polar bears have an advantage, especially in speed. If you ever see a TV program called ‘Polar Bear Battlefield’, you will see a pack of summer-weakened walruses being successfully overrun by equally hungry polar bears – and the bears won.

Polar bears and walruses have lived alongside each other for several thousand years at least, and have learned to coexist with each other within the cold Arctic Ocean and the adjoining tundra. Now humans are changing this balance of power – and both species are the losers. Let us reverse this disturbing trend of global warming – before it is too late.