Stuff You Should Know - The Huggable, Lovable Walrus

Episode Date: March 13, 2018

When it comes to the animal kingdom, SYSK has covered a wide range. This week, the guys dive into the frigid waters of the Arctic to delight in everything that is the huggable, lovable walrus. From their tendency to sticking together in tough times, to the strange noises they make to attract a mating partner, the walrus is now in the running as one of Josh and Chuck's favorites. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm MC Josh, Josh Clark. There's Chuchuchuchuk Bryant,

and Jerry's the DJ on the wheels of steel of Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. And that has nothing to do with what we're talking about today. No, it doesn't. I couldn't even feign surprise. I know it has nothing to do with it. I was just being silly.

I know. You like it. I love it. Silly Josh is one of my top five favorite Josh's. Is it? Uh-huh. So I guess you're feeling pretty good today. Jerry, you are too.

Yeah, she says, yeah, everybody. Yeah. Well, the reason we're feeling good is because there are fewer just simple pleasures in life than researching and talking about animals. Agreed. It's one of my favorite SYSK episode categories as animal ones.

Yeah, and it sort of, I picked this one out and it sort of dawned on me. It had been a minute. And sometimes these are some of our lighter lifts because we have some really great House of Works articles on animals and insects. So it doesn't require another 20 hours of research on stuff. Yeah.

And we needed a lighter lift this week and I was like, hey, it's been a while. I was perusing. I saw walruses and they're so darn cute and lovable. I thought, all right, well, we got to get in there on this. Yeah, plus this is a Jennifer Horton joint. And remember, she used to be like the in-house animal writer.

Oh, was it? Yeah, she does pretty good work, yeah. What happened to her? I don't know. But she left behind a legacy that includes an article on walruses. Yeah, and I will go ahead and say upfront, this is now in the running for me

with a little competition between the octopus. Wow. And the jellyfish. Okay, well then this is what we're gonna do. You're gonna go. Bum-ba-da-ba. That's all I can think of. When a fat comes up that you're like,

this is one of the reasons why they're in competition. Okay. Okay. All right. Oh, and before we get started also, before we get started, sorry. I wanted to give a big shout out to our pals at the Daily Zeitgeist, one of our sister podcasts.

They had me on yesterday. I know, I haven't listened to it yet. How was it? It was pretty great. Like they make it really easy on you. They're like, here, read all these articles that we're potentially gonna talk about and study them for five hours,

just like you do stuff you should know. And then we're not gonna talk about any of those. Not a single article that I researched. Oh no. Did we talk about, but I managed to keep up anyway. That's how easy those guys make it. So thank you to Jack and Miles and Anna for having me. And I guess when you're hearing this,

by yesterday, I mean March 5th. So go back and listen to the March 5th episode of Daily Zeitgeist and then listen to all the episodes of Daily Zeitgeist. Yeah, I saw that they had a cut out, cardboard cut out of you sitting in a chair, which was kind of funny. Yeah, it is funny, but then I'm like,

what are you guys doing with a cardboard cut out of me? I think they probably made it for this, right? I guess, but I didn't, they got a big budget then. We don't have a budget for cardboard cutouts. No, but I'm glad you gave me the inside skinny because I'm gonna be on at some point and now I'm gonna say, hey, don't do that crap you did with Josh.

I'm not reading a bunch of stuff unless we're doing it. Yeah, no, no, just show up. Just show up, relaxed and prepared to talk and you will be great. So the other thing I had to say of the two things, running in for my favorite animal and another movie prediction from, apparently I'm the great movie predictor

or just life predictor. Sure. Pixar, get on it, because if you don't do a lovable story about a family of walruses at some point, then someone else is gonna beat you to the punch. Maybe yes. And it's gonna be great because there's nothing cuter.

Just look up on your favorite image search, walrus, calf and mother or just walrus calf and get ready to be outcuted by most other animals. Like they're so cute, they can make you forget that you're watching them live in captivity. That's how cute those things are. No, some of these are photographed in the wild. Yeah, the videos that I've seen of calves

are mostly the one that was born at SeaWorld. It was like the first walrus born in captivity, I think if I'm not mistaken. He is just as cute as the day is long. But not small, I mean, it's like our size. Yeah, they're not small. No, so like apparently, here's a fact for you. But I'm gonna give you the chance to do your heraldry.

Not gonna make any sounds. All right, cool. The walrus calf is born, born no less than 99 pounds and up to 165 pounds, born. How much? 99 to 165 pounds and for our friends outside of the United States in Liberia, that's 45 to 75 kilograms, born.

Yeah, so a mother, a cow, walrus cow, she's hoping for a 99 pounder. Right. For the ease of birth. Right, because they only get up to like 100 pounds. Yeah. So they're like all calf. And they're all water births though.

No, they're ice births. Oh, I was kinda curious about that. Yeah, all right, we'll get it, we're getting ahead of ourselves. I'm getting excited. All right, we should go back to the beginning. Who invented walruses? They were invented by the guy who invented sea monkeys. Which just dropped today.

Yeah, that was a good one. It was. All right, so should we go to, by beginning, we just mean we're gonna talk about walruses. Well, how about this? We could talk about where they came from because walruses live and they're very, very isolated. Sure.

And as they exist today, there's two species. I guess they're really subspecies, but they can't mate and they're geographically isolated. So they're technically two different species. Can they not mate because they're not near each other or their parts don't fit? Jennifer Horton, I don't know. She just says that they're reproductively isolated,

which means they can't, you know? Yeah. So. They can't hug and kiss. I don't know if that means that, yeah, like their parts don't fit or, but she says they're geographically isolated too. So why would you also say that if they were one and the same?

So. Let's just insult the injury. I guess, I guess so. But there are two groups, subspecies or species of walruses, the Pacific walrus and the Atlantic walrus. Yes. And they're both related. I think they diverged as recently as like half a million

years ago, it's like 500,000 years ago. There used to be a lot of different walrus species. No, there's just the two. But at some point they all descended from the same ancestor of red pandas. So walruses are related to red pandas, just a little back on the family tree. Wow.

And they're even more related to red pandas than they would be to say like manatees, which you'd be like, well, manatees and walruses, same thing. Nope, not even remotely related. I thought you're gonna say Wilfred Brimley. He's what, or Friedrich Nietzsche? Oh, does he have the walrus mustache?

Yeah, or Yosemite Sam? Yeah, and then there was the professional golfer, Craig Stadler. Oh, I don't remember him. He's probably on the senior tour now, but his nickname was the walrus. Well, he would need to look out for Jack Nicholas, whose nickname was the golden bear.

Yeah, they didn't get along. So really did they not? No, no, no, I'm kidding. That would be the polar bear. Yeah, I guess so. So today, Chuck, there are walruses in the north of the Pacific and the north of the Atlantic around basically the Arctic.

Yes. And there's the Pacific walruses and the Atlantic walruses. Yeah, the Pacific, the differentiation here, that the males are generally bigger between nine and 12 feet and roughly 1,700 pounds and about 4,000 at the top, top end. Right.

Women, women. Females, the ladies are about seven and a half feet to 10 feet, 400 to 1250 for the Pacific. The Atlantic males are a little smaller. They top out around the low end of the Pacific and about 2,000 pounds. And the ladies are shorter and a little heavier and about eight feet.

So about the same length, but a little heavier. Yeah, so they're big mammoth jambas. I mean, 800 to 1,700 kilograms for Pacific males. That's big. Those are big boys. And they're all members of the order Pinopedia. So they're related to seals and sea lions. And their Latin name, their scientific name

is Otobenus rosmaris, which means, are you ready for this? Yeah. Toothwalking seahorse. That's great. And the name walrus too, by the way, is a Danish word. Yeah, and of that order, Pinopedia, they're the second largest only to the elephant seal.

And they're the only one that have those tusks, those hallmark tusks of the walrus on the male, jetting down, well, females have them too, but on the male, jetting down from that big, Yosemite sand mustache. Right. Part of what makes them so cute. Yeah, so those tusks, and I was looking up

what the difference between a tusk and a tooth is, I think once it really kind of protrudes from the mouth, it becomes a tusk, but their tusks are just overgrown canines, canine teeth, that grow up to, I think, about a meter, three feet long. That's crazy long. It is, and they can do all sorts of stuff with that, right? So because walruses are so isolated,

they're so far north, so far away from most humans, they have been little studied scientifically, although of the two groups, we know the most about the Pacific walrus, but the stuff we do know has been largely guesses, like only very recently did we figure out that they don't use their tusks to eat, because they eat like seashells,

like mollusks and clams and other bivalves, right? And they used to think that the walruses either use their tusks to root out clams and mollusks off of the sea floor, or they use them to pry open shells. Well, both of those are wrong. It turns out they don't use their tusks for much, except to menace one another

when they're trying to establish dominance. Yeah, that's one of the things they can do, but I think you used a good word there, menace. They don't try and kill one another with their tusks. No. They like to jab at one another and establish dominance as like, hey, I've got bigger tusks, I'm larger than you,

but they're not, first of all, they're protected. They have this really thick skin around their neck and shoulders, so they're protected in a sense, and they're not looking to kill one another either. Right, but they do, I mean, they do draw blood when they jab each other, so their little technique is they lean their heads back,

like so, so that their tusks are parallel with the earth. Yes. And then they go, ninja strike, right? Yeah. And they'll draw a little blood and they'll even like leave scars, but like you said, their necks are so protected with blubber, it's like, it mainly is just to make a point,

and the point typically is move from what I can understand. Yeah, they also will use their tusks sometimes to break through ice, to breathe, and then this one cute, cute move. They're swimming around, they're tired, they might stick their head through and hook their tusks onto the ice

and just hang there for a bit. Yeah. Which is pretty great. Yeah, they have these sacs, pharyngeal sacs that allow them to kind of buoy upright, keep their head upright above water, but I would guess that that gets tiring after a while and eventually just let the old teeth do it, you know?

Yeah, and like I said, the ladies have them too, but the males are longer and stronger, a little bit straighter, and they can grow, I mean, a walrus can live up to 30 years and the tusks may grow for about half of that life. Yeah, I saw 30, I also saw 40 somewhere, that they can live up to 40. All right, that's one of the things,

I'm not gonna make the noise, but any time animals live a long time with one another. Yeah. That kind of gets me. Yeah, and I found this very fascinating about walruses, man. They are very social creatures, like they hang out together,

they swim around together, the boys rest together for months at a time or weeks at a time sometimes, that's during certain times of the year, but they live apart from one another, males and females, they only come together to mate, and then they say, okay, this has been really great, I'll see you next year.

Yeah. I'll see it camp next year. It's very interesting. As far as the rest of their body, they're mostly dark brown, although I don't wanna give it away, but they can change color depending on what they're doing, which is kind of interesting.

And this is one of the situations where it's kind of a big clunky creature on land, but once you get them in the water, then they're just so graceful, which is a really lovely thing to see. Yeah, and when they walk on land, so they turn their flippers out, they're front flippers, they have two pair, right?

So they turn the front flippers out to their side and just kind of use that for side to side stability, and they put their back flippers underneath their pelvis, and they use that to kind of propel themselves forward. It's very cute. Yeah, and because they're on ice, their flippers have like rough bottoms, like a shoe sole almost.

And then in the water, it's kind of a reverse boat thing. They don't steer from the rear. They use those front flippers for steering, and obviously power themselves with those super strong alternating back flippers. It's like one of those ships the hides use to scow. Oh yeah, remember? Yeah, that's right.

So it's basically the walrus of the river boats. Yeah, and these guys can swim, they says they average about four and a half miles an hour. I think that's just when they're kind of cruising, but they can swim as fast as 20 to 25 miles an hour if I guess they're fleeing something, even though they don't really have many predators. No, they don't, they basically have two, don't they?

Well, including humans? They have three, don't they? Okay, what are they? Oh, okay, well, if you want to talk predators, they have polar bears, as you said earlier. Oh, right, sure. Killer whales, and then humans. Right.

But that's one of the reasons why they've been so successful, and we'll talk about that, how successful, and whether or not they're thriving or stable, or whatever spoiler they are, right after this, huh? Hey dude, and so, time to go, time to go. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. ["I Heart Radio"] All right, Chuck, we're back. That's right. And if you've ever, have you ever seen,

did you notice in any of the videos that a walrus up close, like in their face? What do you mean? So, their eyes in particular, they have like, pug eyes. You know, pug's eyes look like they're about to pop at any minute. Yeah, they always looked a little surprised. Yeah.

I didn't know this because there was a camera on them all of a sudden. It could have been. I was looking up walrus intelligence because, you know, there's a lot of videos about walruses where they're saying like, you know, whistle or speak or whatever, because as we'll see, walruses can make a lot of cool noises.

And the walruses do the different things. So they're obviously trainable, which means that there's some level of intelligence. But I couldn't find anything about like, oh yeah, these guys are as intelligent as an octopus or a pig or something. Couldn't find anything like that. But they are trainable.

As anyone who's seen the screen classic 51st Dates can tell you. I don't think I saw that. That's a good one, actually. Oh yeah? Yeah. Sandler and Drew Barrymore, right? Where does the walrus fit in?

He is like a marine biologist who specializes at I think in walruses or something like that. No, because he's got penguin friends too. But anyway, there's a trained walrus that factors into it. Oh, I'll have to check that out. It's actually a pretty cute movie. Hey, you got me at that. I'm Sandler and walrus.

Okay. So these guys and ladies are, like you said, all over the Arctic. If we're talking Pacific, we're talking the Bering Sea, the Chukchi, which shout out to my friend, Max Goldman. I just saw on Facebook this morning, he had a great picture of himself staring out at the icy Chukchi Sea.

Wow. My only Alaskan friend. It sounds really cool. Yeah, it was really gorgeous. And I said something about, hey, I was just reading about this and of course he's on Alaska time. So he's probably not woken up yet.

He's like, I can see Russia from my house. He might. And then the Laptep Sea in the Pacific. And then along the coast of Canada on the Atlantic side in Greenland is where you're gonna find the other guys. And we're talking 250 total walruses, about 200,000 of which are Pacific.

Yeah, 250,000 total. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but again, we'll get to it later, but they're doing okay. Yeah, they really seem to be, don't they? Yeah, we don't want people to worry too much about the walrus. So back to the walrus' pug eyes, right? Yes.

They kind of protrude and you'd think, wow, that walrus can see all over the place. It's doing a 360 with its eye right now. Not necessarily. They're actually not the best at seeing, but they don't need to be because their other organs are more evolved to kind of make up for it.

They hunt and can smell out predators using their nose, I think is probably their primary sense from what I understand. Well, yeah, and their ears, they can hear, they have these two little kind of flap ears, basically openings with a little protective flap. And they can hear things like perhaps pray up to a mile away.

Yeah, so I was looking for that. Did you see that anywhere else? No. It was one of those ones that raised a red flag. Really? Because I looked all over and was like seeing just that. Yeah, they can hear for up to a mile away. The closest thing I saw that proved that

was demonstrations by Arctic natives who would make like a walrus call and like a walrus like a mile away would respond to it. They said, hey, walrus. And the walrus looked around, said, you talking to me? Yes, sir. Oh, is that how they talk? Yeah, like Southern gentlemen.

They have that high cotton accent. Don't even know what that means. That's a Southern thing like, well, there's a bar in Charleston called high cotton. So that's what I was thinking of, yeah. Gotcha. So their noses though is where that's their moneymaker. They have, it's very sensitive.

Like you said, they used to think that they use their tusks, or I don't know if you said it, but they used to think they use their tusks to grind into the seafloor. Yeah, yeah. And dig things up, but that is not the case. They are blowing out of their nose to clear away stuff and stir up things to eat.

And those whiskers, those, what do you say? Call those Vibrasae, Vibrasae? Sure. 400 to 700 of those in 13 to 15 rows. Not only do they look cute and like a big walrus mustache, but they are super sensitive. Yeah, so that's like their tactile sense then,

these little whiskers, the sensitive whiskers. And they use those, so they shoot water out of their nose into the bottom of the sea and it stirs up some stuff. The clams are like, stop, stop. And they start to float up. And the walruses sense the clams with their whiskers, their Vibrasae or whatever you call them. And then things get even weirder, right?

Because remember, they don't use their tusks to open the clams. They don't use their tusks to burrow. Their tusks actually appear to kind of get in the way, if anything, as far as feeding is concerned. What they do is, they have a very high cavity in their mouth and they can pump their tongue back and forth like a piston.

So they actually produce a form of suction, so strong. It sucks a clam right out of the shell. So cool. The clam, they can't say anything. Yeah, that poor clam. They're just hanging out down there before you know it. They get snotted on and sucked out and a lot of them too. It's a very undignified ending for the clam.

Yeah, it says in here, and I didn't find backup for this, but I believe it, is that that suction is so powerful, they've been known to suck holes in plywood. I saw that, yeah, I saw that elsewhere too, that they've had like five pound plugs in some of their aquatic habitats. They've sucked out of the flower. That's crazy.

Also known as the floor. The flower? Yeah, yeah, so they do have- That was your hot cotton exit. Right, out of the floor, so. They do have like that, some amazing suction going on, and they don't even chew. They have these amazing like three foot teeth.

They don't even chew with any of them. They just eat a clam whole. And I think, did you say 3,000 to 6,000 of them in a sitting? No, I said a whole lot. That's a lot. Yeah, they said that they can eat between four and 6% of their body weight each day.

So let's just say an average 3,000 pound walrus eating about 5%. That's 150 pounds a day of not just clams. They're not super picky. Anything down there, sea worms, snails, crabs, they'll eat all that stuff. But I get the feeling that they really love those clams. Yeah, they like the clams the most.

As they should. But think about that. If there's 250,000 walruses in the world, all basically up in the Arctic. And each one is eating something like 3,000 to 6,000 clams a day. How have clams not taken over the world by now? Yeah, it's crazy.

It's that, you know, the comedian Nate Bargazzi? Yes, I do. He has that funny joke about a million sharks a year killed. And he was just like, I didn't know there's ever been a million sharks in the history of the world. Like, that just sounds like a lot of sharks. Except Nate does it great because his delivery is that of a professional comedian.

And that High Cotton X. And not me. Well, he is from Tennessee. There you go. So they're eating cheese. I mean, I can't even do the math. 250,000 times 4,000 equals a ton. And we're still able to dip our crostini and clam juice

at an Italian dinner. Do you like clams? Sure. I'm more of an oyster guy. I like them both. I like to be turned on by my food, you know? Well, I mean, I definitely love oysters. And we'll never not order them if it's

at a place with a good chance of having good ones. Sure. But I'll dip into a clam shell. Well, you put clams in your Bloody Mary mix. Oh, yeah, Clamato. Sure. That's clam juice. Yeah, oh man.

I could kick it up a notch if I put a couple of clams in there. Yeah. Not in the shell, but just like pick the meat out. Well, yeah, live. Have them like live in there for a little while. Get used to that vodka. They do live up by Russia. I bet there's been more than one beach bar called

the Drunken Clam. There's got to be. And they're like, I think that's the bar on the family guy. Oh, is it? I'm pretty sure. Oh, we're going to find out if it's not. Yeah. I don't know, man.

I feel like we've gone a little off the rails. Should we take a break, or can we pull it back without it? Well, quickly, let's talk about the third potential breed. There is another subspecies that is not officially a subspecies that lives in the Laptev Sea near Siberia called the Laptev Walrus. And apparently their skull and body size is pretty similar to the Atlantic and the Pacific.

And I'm not sure why it wants its own distinction, but they haven't been recognized as such. Despite the protests. Yeah, I mean, they must be different enough in some way. Yeah, I saw some people see them as a different species. Other people just do not. I'm not sure what the deal is. Maybe they're isolated themselves.

I don't know. I don't know either. Now you want to take a break? Yeah. OK. Hey, go, and go, try to go, try to go. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS,

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right. So one of the other things that I love, insert whatever sound effect is in your head, listener, is that they are very, and this is the same deal with the elephant in any creature that's very sensitive and caring to one another. They will watch over their injured friends. If one of them dies, they will push them off the ice

if hunters are nearby, so they can't get them. The ladies will, and this is so sad, but the ladies will carry their dead young away from hunters. And if they sense that their dudes nearby, these hunter men nearby, they can hack away at ice to break it away and free a calf that might be stuck or something. Yeah, they could really take care of each other. It's been documented.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. They are very sensitive creatures, it turns out. So I don't think we could talk about walruses if we didn't talk about blubber, right? Yes. So you said that it's pretty thick. I think that's an understatement, Chuck. The blubber layer on a walrus is something

like about almost four inches, 10 centimeters thick. And during the winter, when they're at their blubberiest, it's about a third of their body weight. So they might have like 1,000 pounds of fat in their body at any given point in time, which is pretty, you got to tip your hat to that. Well, yeah, and this, of course, this is an adaptation to deal with the temperatures where they

live, keep them warm. Apparently they lose heat 27 times faster in water. And they are in water, what is it, like 2 thirds of their life or something like that? Yeah. So they have this remarkable blubber to keep that body temperature at about 98 degrees, 97.9 degrees, pretty consistently.

Right, so you were saying you were eluding earlier to how they can change color. Here's how. You ready? Yes. When they're in the water for a while, or when they're exposed to really, really cold temperatures, their body pumps blood away from their skin

and sends it to their core to keep their internal organs warm. Because the skin doesn't need to be as warm as, say, the internal organs. It's a survival mechanism, right? Yeah. And then once they start to warm up, when that happens, they turn kind of white, like a white worm kind of thing going on.

Did you ever see that movie, The Layer of the White Worm? No, but that sounds familiar. It was an early Hugh Grant movie where like there's this group in England that like worship this white worm that comes out like every century or something like that. It's like a weird English horror movie that is also kind of funny in some ways.

It's a good one. But anyway, that's what a walrus looks like when it's really, really cold. Like Hugh Grant. Yeah. But white, super white. He's about as white as it gets. These guys get even whiter because they're very, very cold.

That's right. And then once they get back to where the sun is shining or maybe back on the ice where it's ironically slightly warmer, their color can come back. They're still brown, but they can get a little bit more of a pinky look to them. Yeah. With that blubber, they can handle water

that's like down to negative 4 degrees Fahrenheit, to something like negative 20 Celsius. And like you said, they spend 2 thirds of their life of water this cold. They live in the Arctic, so they're pretty well suited for it. Well, negative 4 is the low end. It can go all the way down to negative 59. Wow.

That's nutty. Wow. And they do have little hairs that they shed in the summer, but it's pretty much everyone is in agreement that it doesn't really do much to keep them warm. It's leftover from when they were bears. That's my theory. It probably is.

Yeah. So they have another cool adaptation. They can go a long time without oxygen. And this all has to do with how they circulate oxygen in their blood. So when they dive, they actually slow their heart rate down. And then that blood, again, goes to those organs because they need oxygen and warmth.

And they also have a special protein in their blood called myoglobin that binds with the oxygen and then actually stores it in the muscles. Right. So they have plenty of oxygen whenever they're diving. How deep do they dive? I can't remember. It's said they feed, I think, from between 30-something

and 150 to 175 feet. But they prefer a little shallower because one of the worries with global warming is the sea ice is retreating and going away. So they're having to go further and further north to get to the sea ice, which means that the waters are deeper. So they're having to learn how to dive deeper to feed. And that's just one of the effects of global warming

is sometimes the moms will get separated from their calves because it's such a long journey. And they don't know, are they going to be able to adapt and learn to dive that deep to hunt for food? Right. And yeah, it's not just where they hunt for food from. It's kind of like their little base, right? So when they're on ice or an ice flow,

they'll dive for food. They'll come back up, they'll rest. That's where they sleep. That's where moms and their calves rest. Sometimes they nurse there. It's where cows give birth to calves. There's like ice plays a very, very important role in the walrus' life.

So much so that in the Pacific walrus, the females basically just follow the edge of the ice north in the summer and then come back down south in the winter as the ice ebbs and flows toward the north pole. And as it doesn't retreat as far down, it's messing with their program a little bit, like you said. Not just with food, but also with just typical regular behavior.

Yeah. I bet in a lot of these cases, too, there's got to be just some confusion, you know? Yeah. Like if you're for however many millions of years you've been used to the same thing, and if all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute, like where are we going now?

They're like, I'm just a walrus. Your world frightens and confuses me. What happened to the accent? Well, this is a different walrus. This is Ted, the walrus. Also, that pharyngeal muscle that you were talking about, which they can puff up to kind of buoy them, they also will puff that up to close off water

from entering their lungs when they dive. Right. Pretty amazing. Let's talk about those pharyngeal sacs, because they are pretty amazing. There's a lot of stuff they can do with those. First of all, walruses make some of the coolest sounds of any animal I've ever heard.

Yeah. There's a clip on YouTube, just type in walrus sounds, and there's one that comes up, and it's just a static picture of a big, old, gigantic walrus. What do they call them? Are they called bulls? Well, they call them cows and calves, probably, but I didn't see bulls anywhere.

A dude walrus, right? Just a big boy. And it's about 2 and 1 half minutes of just the best walrus sounds, and it's actually, in a really weird way, kind of soothing. You can have it on in the background. I noticed I retained 12% more information while it was playing than I did when I wasn't listening to it,

right? I just made that statistic up, but you get the point. And can we play some of it? Yeah, can we do that? Sure we can. Jerry's nodding, and she rolled her eyes. Well, here's like 20 seconds of some good walrus sounds. So 10, 20 seconds.

Who knows what it'd be? Well, we can only use 10 because of rights issues. Oh, OK. You don't want to get sued by the walrus association. Right, exactly. I'm Ted walrus, and I've had enough of this getting pushed around. So the way that the walrus are one of the ways

the walrus makes so many different sounds is because of these pharyngeal sacs that they use to buoy themselves with. They use it also as an amplifier, and they make all these sounds when they're mating with women. That's right. So you remember how the females in the Pacific

go north in the summer and then come back in the winter? On their way back, they meet up with the guys who generally stay south in the Bering Sea the whole year. And that's just Pacific. The Atlantic ones stay put year-round both males and females. But as the Pacific females are coming back, mating season is timed perfectly with that. And they will sit in groups of about 20 or 23

on a big chunk of ice and say, dudes, let's see what you got. Yeah, and then the little Gilligan's Island talent show starts. And they literally line up out there, give each other a little space. They fight for that prime spot. Yeah, they'll tusk.

Yeah, that's when they get a little aggressive. And the poor always feel bad for the guys, like on the back row or whatever. He's got to really ramp up his vocalization, I guess. And he's like, my tusk broke. But he's probably got a lady out there who likes that. I hope so. But they do.

They kind of perform for them. They do a little routine. And the ladies are like, you, a sexually mature man who, I think, the male reaches sexual maturity at about eight to 10, females five to six. But this is adorable. They still don't hug and kiss until a few years after. Just because they just, I don't know,

they want to do it the right way, I think. That we don't have to take our close-off song is one of the Walrus' favorite songs of all time. They're really big into promise rings. But friendship bracelets first. Sure. So the female has a gestation period of about 15 months. So this is a big deal.

They're pregnant for a long time. So they want to hook up with the right dude to get them pregnant depending on when it falls, depending on when it falls in the cycle. They may even sit that out if they're pregnant. They may take a year off. Yeah, they're like, I'm good. I'm covered.

But that is the thing. Like, if a cow is pregnant, come next mating season. Like you said, she's going to hang off to the side and wait for her friends to be done so they can keep going south. But that actually is going to have an impact on her calf because she's going to spend more time raising it and nursing it.

Yeah, which is really great. Like if that happens and the timing works out, they can be with their young for up to a couple of years. Yeah, which is really sweet. I think like a male calf. So remember, males and females, they separate. They only come together during mating season. And then if you're a male calf that's born,

you're hanging out with your mom for a year or two years, depending on the timing of a pregnancy. And then you go off with the male herd and say, what up? Boys, I'm here. It's a party. And they said, get at the back of the line. Yeah. I saw that it sounds so adorable that very young walrus calves,

boys, will practice that tusking thing. Oh, really? Even before their tusks are grown out. So they mess around with each other like, I'm going to tusk you when my tusks come in. Look, I'd love to see that. It's like little goats before they get their horns. Yeah.

They can do the same thing when they just have those old nubs. They just walk around with headaches all the time. I have goats that live across the street from me. I don't think I've told you that. Satanic goats are cute goats. No, cutest. OK. Good Christian goats.

Yeah. Yeah, they're great. I'm not sure what the, Pat, my neighbor across the street had like seven or eight of them last year. And they went away for the winter. And now she has a new batch. And she's, no, no, no, she's Jamaican. And I think what someone said in the neighborhood

is that she keeps these goats around and then raises them and then has them shipped to Jamaica as like a charitable thing. What? Right. Where they are eaten. I don't know if they're eaten. I'm pretty sure.

I'm not sure. But this is a new batch of goats. And of course, you know, my kid loves it. Yeah, I love goats too. Little baby goats, baby lambs. I saw, you mean I watched this documentary called The Secret Life of Dogs. Have you seen it?

No. It's from 2013. I think BBC originally made it. If you get a membership with Curiosity, a subscription on Curiosity on Amazon Prime, it's on there. That's the only place I've found it, I think. Is it a sub thing I have to join because I'm already on the Prime?

Yes, it is. It's an extra subscription. But it's like a seven day trial or something like that. It's like, are you really curious? Are you willing to pay for it? So they have The Secret. Just check it out. Check you're going to love it.

It's just a really well made documentary. But in part of it, there's this herding dog, some sort of shepherd, that bottle feeds a baby lamb. Holding a bottle in her mouth, this little lamb is nursing off of the bottle. It's one of the most adorable things you'll ever see in your entire life. Well, I think we've agreed in the past that

interanimal mingling and coupling and friendship is the best thing in the world. Maybe not coupling, but the rest of it agreed. Well, yeah, I don't mean like that. I just mean in a friendly way. One of the other, there's just one more thing about this. The woman who owns the dog, or who I should say is best friends with this dog, said, I didn't teach her this.

She picked this up herself. Wow. Yeah, and I just dropped the mic, as you can see. I probably watched 25 minutes the other day of baby pigs playing with puppies. Oh, that's adorable. It's pretty great. Man.

OK, so back to the walruses. Yeah, back to reproduction. This is kind of really cool, actually. For the first up to five months of gestation, the eggs aren't even implanting yet. So they just float around in the uterus for up to five months, and then eventually will implant on the uterine wall. And they think this is all done on purpose

so that the calf is born at the right time in the best environment possible. Yeah, I thought that was a weird adaptation. Like, why not just have a shorter gestation time? But I guess they got it figured out. I'm not going to pry. So again, it's 15 month gestation period, and the calves are born usually on ice, which again,

melting ice is a problem for them. And then they stick around for a year or two, go off to the male herd, and then you've got the males and the females. And the females migrate in the Pacific. The males generally stay around the same area, which means that they move to land when the ice recedes. And there's actually this island in Alaska called Round Island.

It's very famous for being a walrus summering area, where for a couple of weeks, I think, every summer, and for reasons no one knows, the walrus males all just come to this one island, and there'll be like 12,000 of them just on top of one another hanging out, just basically being social, having a boy's week. That's great. And it's so dense with walruses.

It's a wall to wall walrus. You can't see the sand, or not the sand, but is there sand? Or is it just ice? It is sand. Or no, I'm sorry. I read that it's rocky. I haven't actually seen it myself. But you can't see anything beneath the walruses.

It's just walrus flesh and blubber. Yeah, there's this one. If you ever drive at the coast of California, I'm going to butcher this, because I don't remember what the animal was. If it's a manatee, it's probably not a manatee. I think it's sea lions if it's coast of California, yeah. But there's something near the house, the Hearst Castle.

There's a beach that Emily and I drove by that was wall to wall, I guess, at sea lions when we went. I'm pretty sure. And it's got to be a certain time of year, maybe a time of day. I have no idea. But we didn't even know. We just sort of lucked upon it and saw a bunch of cars pulled over with mouths agape.

And sure enough, the whole thing and the sound was amazing. It was just a bunch of, imagine one thing going, oh, oh, oh, and then imagine 1,000 things doing that. Right. They're like the sweat hogs. Right. Mr. Cater. Very nice.

On cue. Thank you. All right, Chuck. So we said there's basically three predators for the walrus, the polar bear, which by the way, I saw that a walrus can fend off a polar bear with its tusks one on one. Oh, yeah.

The way that polar bears hunt walruses is they cause a stampede. And walruses try to get away from the polar bear and they will trample a few unfortunate walruses. And the polar bear comes up and says, hey, thanks for the free meal. Man. That's how they hunt walruses. The same thing happens when humans get too close,

say like in a low flying plane or just basically spook the walruses. But they are hunted, but very, very, very narrowly by a very small group of people in UPAC and the UPIC natives of the Arctic area in the US, Canada, and Russia are basically the only human beings allowed to hunt a walrus. And the reason why is because it's

part of their cultural tradition to hunt walruses. And when they were forced to stop for about 30 years from the 60s to the 90s, their culture really started to suffer a decline as a result. Yeah, and they are protected as such now. Over the years, they've been hunting walruses, it says here, since the 9th century. These are oil, the ivory, of course, for art, their skin.

And for many years, they were being depleted because of the oil, mainly, that they would use for soap or lamps, or it says here even machine lubricant. But we have gotten on board with protecting them, along with, like you said, Canada and Russia. And they're doing pretty good now. Yeah, apparently the population is stable. They're listed as vulnerable.

I didn't see why, because they are almost universally protected by Arctic nations. So there's not a ton of poaching a little bit, but it's not like poaching in Africa. Right, for their ivory, typically, right? So I think for the reason why it might be climate change, then, that would be the only thing I can see, because they're pretty well protected.

Reproductively, they're doing top notch. And that's it. I wonder if when a polar bear is eating a walrus, if they get in there and they're like, hey, Phil, this thing's got like 2,000 clams in them, too. This is bonus. And I've read, actually, that their meat is hard, kind of tough, but it's also very lean, and supposedly very tasty, as well.

Really? Yeah, and one of the things the Inupiaq and the upakes are known for is using 100% of the walruses that they kill. Yeah, I think a lot of times, almost all the time with indigenous peoples, they understand the value of a creature and respect that animal. And part of that respect is, I'm just going to take these tusks and kick it back on the water.

It's using everything from the stomach for a drum to the skin to cover your boat. Right. Or raincoats, apparently. Yeah. They used to use their, what was it, the intestines for raincoats? Yeah.

It's pretty sharp. And apparently, these villages, too, they were early environmentalists. They would set their own standards for hunting because they knew the value of making sure they thrived. Yeah, I've read this really interesting article. I think on a site called Cultural Survival or something, and it detailed how the, I think, the UPICS and the US

government in Alaska, over 30 years, came to an agreement, finally, about hunting on Round Island. But it was pretty interesting. I was like, wow, the government really has taken this seriously, this protection. They just wouldn't give at all on any of it. And then, finally, the UPICS were like, we have to do this culturally.

This is not just us being yahoos doing this for fun. We have to do this. We're losing this cultural tradition. So they came to an understanding that apparently is doing quite well. Nice. Just like the walruses. That's right.

If you want to know more about walruses, check out walrusesonhowstuffworks.com. There's a good article on there. And since I said how stuff works, it's time for Listener Mail. All right, I'm going to call this wonderful email from an 11-year-old kid. We always love these.

Hey, Josh and Chuck, I love listening to your podcast. And it brings me great joy every day. I'm 11 years old. And I think your podcast is awesome for all ages and is very informative. I'm learning so many new things. My mom is even surprised. I just wanted to let you guys know how happy you make me

and how much fun I have listening to you. Man, this is nice. Isn't that nice? I tell people all kinds of things they never know. And they're like, wow, how did you know that? And I say, I listen to how stuff works. So thanks for your time and stay awesome. That is Lucas.

Lucas, you stay awesome. You stay awesome. And you start saying stuff you should know instead of how stuff works. Yeah. But that's OK. It's close. It's close.

The people might eventually find us if he steers into how stuff works. That's right. We appreciate it, Lucas. And if you're listening to us at 11, then you are on the right track, my friend. And stay cool, because remember, we lose them around high school.

Yeah. Don't get lost around high school, Lucas, because we'll still be here making episodes. Where will you be? Yeah. And secret, we are cool. Yeah. No matter what your high school friends tell you.

Correct. In the meantime, we're glad you're listening to us. And we appreciate the listener mail. If you want to send us the listener mail, we appreciate. We would love to hear it. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast, or at Josh Elm Clark. You can hang out with us on facebook.com

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On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it.

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