All over the web today, there’s the theme of: “dead walrus = caused by climate change”. On the Climate Progress blog they have this picture of the dead walruses (seen at left) which have been circulated by the Associated Press. I found the source photo on the Alaskan Daily News (ADN) here.
While uncredited on Climate Progress, the photo appears to have been taken from an airplane or helicopter by Tony Fischbach of the U.S. Geological Survey and distributed via The Associated Press.
In the ADN news article two things stand out:
1- The USFWS official quoted in the article, says that he doesn’t know the cause of the deaths:
“It’s just too early to say until we can get someone on the ground,” Woods said.
They report the dead walruses appeared to be mostly new calves or yearlings. However, neither the age of the dead walruses nor the cause of death is known, said Bruce Woods, spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
2- The AP reporter, Dan Joling, gives a platform to somebody who also isn’t on the ground, or even Alaska but works in San Francisco, who assigns climate change as the blame:
Shaye Wolf, spokeswoman for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the walrus deaths were alarming.
“It provides another indicator that climate change is taking a brutal toll on the Arctic,” she said.
This isn’t the first time AP writer Jolin has had a story angle downplayed by Brice Woods. The other poster child for Arctic climate change, the polar bear was part of a 2006 AP story where woods also downplayed the significance.
Before I say anything further, let me point out that I’m no expert on Alaskan wildlife. That being said, neither is Joe Romm and many of the other bloggers who repeated the AP story. So, I’m no more qualified to comment than any of them are. But since they’ve advanced a theory, I wish to do so also. I want to draw your attention to something curious in the Fischbach photograph that many websites used, but made no commentary on outside of the “dead walrus = caused by climate change” script.
Expand the photo above. Note that every walrus has what appears to be blood on it. I counted seven in the photo, each having a one or more red spots that seem to be bloody in origin. I can’t tell if the heads and tusks are on them carcasses either. Maybe somebody who knows what a dead beach walrus is supposed to look like can tell better? Hold onto that thought for a bit.
One of the theories from the “dead walrus = caused by climate change” theme is “Retreating sea ice might have taken away some of the platforms walrus use to hunt and rest, pushing to walrus to shore.”
Here’s a summary on the walrus from the University of Michigan:
Walruses prefer to inhabit areas with ice floes in the shallower regions near the coasts of Arctic waterways. Their seasonal migration patterns coincide with the changes in the ice. In the winter, walruses move south as the Arctic ice expands, and in the summer they retreat north as the ice recedes. This migration can cover distances of 3000 km. Individuals concentrate where the ice is relatively thin and dispersed in the winter. In the summer time, bulls may use isolated coastal beaches and rocky islets. Cows and young prefer to stay on ice floes in all seasons (Nowak 1991, Parker 1990).
And so says the theory, because they were pushed to shore, they were trampled by a stampede. No other cause is considered in this recent blast of news stories.
A stampede can be triggered by a polar bear, a plane or other perceived threat to the herd. That’s certainly possible. It has happened before according to this report from the Seattle Times in 2007:
Walruses are vulnerable to stampedes when they gather in such large numbers. The appearance of a polar bear, a hunter or a low-flying airplane can send them rushing to the water.
Sure enough, scientists received reports of hundreds and hundreds of walruses dead of internal injuries suffered in stampedes. Many of the youngest and weakest animals, mostly calves born in the spring, were crushed.
Biologist Anatoly Kochnev of Russia’s Pacific Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography estimated 3,000 to 4,000 walruses out of population of perhaps 200,000 died, or two or three times the usual number on shoreline haulouts.
He said the animals only started appearing on shore for extended periods in the late 1990s, after the sea ice receded.
“The reason is the global warming,” Kochnev said.
Here’s the article photo that shows a trampled walrus:
ANATOLY A. KOCHNEV / AP
This photo provided by Pacific Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography shows a dead walrus, foreground, after a stampede on Cape Vankarem, Russia in March, 2007.
Here’s another photo and story from the same time period, from Physorg.com
Headless Walruses Alarm Alaska Officials
August 16th, 2007 By MARY PEMBERTON, Associated Press Writer
A dead walrus without its ivory tusks lay washed up on a beach of Norton sound off the coast of Nome, Alaska on Wednesday Aug. 15, 2007. The larger than normal number of walrus carcasses washing up on the beaches of Norton Sound has prompted an investigation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. (AP Photo/Diana Haecker)
(AP) — An unusually high number of walrus carcasses missing their heads and ivory tusks have washed up on beaches this summer, alarming wildlife officials.
###
No mention of “global warming” in that story. It also didn’t get much coverage. Old news, poachers at work, move along nothing to see here.
But it brings up an interesting question. In the Fischbach photo above that prompted the latest round of “dead walrus = caused by climate change” stories, we have seven of seven carcasses apparently with blood on them. Many of them appear to have blood only at one end. In the 2007 Kochnev dead walrus photo above, attributed to trampling, we don’t see any blood as would be expected by a trampling, which usually causes death by internal injuries and traumatic asphyxiation.
In the paper on traumatic asphyxiation, they don’t attribute much to blunt force injuries, and there’s no mention of blood. True, its about humans, but humans are mammals with lungs also and I can’t find any papers on walrus tramplings. I’d venture it to be undocumented.
I suppose it is possible that some blood might be seen in a mass trampling of walrii, but in seven out of seven carcasses?
Another possible explanation that fits the blood evidence in the Fischbach photo might be illegal poaching for tusks. With the walrus on the beach and within easy reach of anyone with a rifle, they’d make easy targets, but that seems to not to be in the realm of possibilities for our current news writers and bloggers.
Here’s an article that talks about the walrus in depth and notes the poaching issue:
Although both the United States and Russia have prohibited hunting except by native peoples, some conservationists contend that this “subsistence” hunting is now primarily commercial. Poaching has increased since an international moratorium on international trade of elephant ivory was enacted (walrus ivory is a good substitute for many purposes). Between poaching and the legal killing of 10,000-15,000 walruses in the eastern and western Arctic each year, the population of all walruses is likely to decrease greatly.
Now again I’m no expert on Alaskan wildlife but in the current news context, why isn’t anyone mentioning the poaching issue at all?
The International Whaling Ban was put into effect in 1986. This too put a big crimp on the illicit world market for ivory, driving the price up.
Since then there’s been quite a bit of walrus poaching for ivory.
In 1992, the CBS Evening News did a report on Walrus poaching:
(Studio: Dan Rather) Report introduced.
(Washington: Rita Braver) Walrus poaching ring in Alaska featured; excerpt shown of poaching videotaped by undercover United States Fish and Wildlife agent. [Fish and Wildlife Service director, John TURNER – talks about illegal ivory trading.] Details given, videotape excerpt shown of bogus trading post sting operation by United States Fish and Wildlife agents. [Special agent Adam O’HARA – comments on poachers.]
Here’s a prosecution in the news in 2004:
Men accused of shooting animals to sell tusks – without using the rest of them
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FAIRBANKS – Five Gambell men are accused of poaching walruses in the Bering Sea to sell the tusks. http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/080804/sta_poaching.shtml
An here’s a recent investigative report that has been turned into a book. “Animal Investigators: How the World’s First Wildlife Forensics Lab Is Solving Crimes and Saving Endangered Species”
Excerpts:
At a recent meeting, leaders of the Alaska Native walrus hunting community had urged him to investigate illegal walrus hunting. While most Alaskan Natives scorned “headhunting,” —killing a walrus simply for its ivory tusks—Crane could see numerous examples from the seat of his plane. Local residents typically blamed the Russian villages on the other side of the Bering Strait. They claimed time and waves brought the dead animals to Alaska and that local Inuit hunters took the tusks – the only part that could be salvaged from the decomposing bodies.
Had the animals died naturally and then had their heads cut off? Or had they been killed for their tusks? Did Russian bullets kill the animals? Had Alaskans? The situation had been going on for years, and it was time to put an end to it. Crane needed definitive answers.
Normally, Crane would have sent the items to the lab for analysis. This time, the sheer size and number of the bodies forced a different approach. A team of forensic scientists, composed of FWS Lab Director Ken Goddard, Deputy Director Edgard (Ed) Espinoza, and veterinary medical examiner Richard (Dick) Stroud, would go to the scene.
Like the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Animal Investigators spotted dead walrus from the air. Then they went onto the beach to give the full CSI treatment.
But what if Animal Investigators had simply shrugged their shoulders and said “eh, global warming”?
We know the Arctic has had warm spells before, such as occurred in 1922.
November 2nd, 1922. Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.
The walrus apparently did OK then, as it has through millenia before man. Why all of the sudden then is the main cause of walrus deaths attributed to “global warming”. Is it reporting bias, like we’ve seen with extreme weather events now viewed by satellite and Doppler radar that would have gone unnoticed in the past? Given that we now have broad eyes and ears in the Arctic, are we simply more attuned than 100 years ago? Id say that is a factor.
Bu also, why when given a news photo showing seven apparently bloody walrus carcasses has nobody raised the possibility of poaching?
Nobody, including me, wants to see our Alaskan wildlife die or be killed through greed, stupidity, or carelessness. But before we go slapping on that catch all label of “global warming did it”, even before the primary wildlife investigators of this weeks event get a chance to get on the ground and determine the cause, we owe it to the animals and to ourselves to look at all the possibilities and to wait to determine the true cause before we go laying blame.
Otherwise, walrus poaching might just get a free pass under the guise of “global warming did it”.
Just doing a little Googling on the subject of walrus and their habits and habitats and so far everything that comes up mentions that walrus spend winter months on the ice. But they spend the summers on rocky beaches. Doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with “climate change”.
And on that photo, there are many of the wounds on the same part of each body, but two have other blood spots at different sites on the body. I’ve been tinkering a bit with the photo here (would still love a hi-res but I haven’t found one yet) and one of the carcasses has a large blood spot on the right side of the body by its hind legs(flippers).
I’m sort of leaning toward the theory of a stampede caused by the photographer’s plane swooping low for a good camera angle.
Loved that article from 1922, too. They didn’t lament the lack of ice but rather were excited at the increased ability to explore more of what they could never before reach. They wanted to see what they could find. I like that.
I have shot and seen animals shot all my life, these animals were in all likelihood shot with a high calibre rifle. Notice all but the 2 foreground carcasses clearly show head shots and in roughly the same location.
The one closest to the photographer is interesting, I see at least two full pass-through wounds which lead my to suspect a high powered rifle. Because the blood stains are on top of the bodies, this suggests wounds inflicted while the animal was alive ( hence the bleed outs from the belly wounds in the closest animals) so scavenger wounds are out.
That is my CSI for today and of course is just am pinion based on the one photograph. lets see if the real story ever comes out of Fish and Wildlife.
On the other hand….
(sarc)
So perhaps it was so hot due to AGW in the Arctic that a Walrus went “postal” and killed his/her co-workers/herd with a tusk sharpened by rubbing it on the rocks. All in a effort to ease the food and Ice resource depletion that is pressuring the planet and threatening to destroy the entire species? Now that is a AGW TV Special Plot!
Wow being an AGW alarmist is easy! Just make anything up!
(/sarc)
I seem to recall that dead bodies do not bleed. After the heart stops, blood tends to pool in the lowest region of the corpse. It’s really hard to see much detail in those photos, but I suspect there is too much blood visible to be the result of post-mortem wounds. I’m no expert on this however, and maybe some one with some medical background could post some facts for us rather than speculation….
Looks like a hunt to me.
I see footprints leading to each of the carcasses in the lead picture. There are also tireprints from a 4-wheeler and maybe a trailer in the lower left hand area and a straight line like something was drug in the upper part of the picture.
Those walruses were just killed – there are no birds or other wildlife feeding on them and the blood is still red.
One walrus is on its back – it had to have been rolled that way. And its bloody on its body, unlike the others. It must have been shot several times, then rolled into a position where the hunters had to roll it over to get to it.
Also, all the walruses are the same size. Might they all be bulls?
REPLY: Nice setup job Phil. But I learned something new today.
No set up Anthony, you brought up 1922 yourself.
So what about the Walri in Svalbard in 1922? what did they do? Were they frozen up on the ice or on the beach? Did nature crish a few in a beach stampede or did some hunters take a few?
Hunters probably took a few but not many since they were virtually extinct there by then. That population is currently recovering following being protected by the Norwegian and Russian governments in the 50s.
We could go round and round with this argument. Point is, you can’t pin what happened or didn’t happen to walri in 1922 to global warming any more than you can today.
– Anthony
Although the large herds on land on the Russian coast is a new phenomenon coincident with the loss of ice over shallow water in the summer. Whether that has anything to do with the walrus carcasses referred to above is total speculation.
REPLY:Russian Coast? Svalbard is Norway. Yes its all total total speculation….as is man made global warming being the cause of any of this. Which is the point of the article. – Anthony
The current Arctic Ocean sea ice extent graph (link on right side of page) now shows the 2009 line (red) crossing the 2005 line (green). I also note, with interest, that in recent years the ice extent has been below the 1979-2000 average (NSIDC). Further, 2007 and 2008 were both quite low in the sequence. Because the average, as meant and calculated in this case, is skewed by the extreme cases – when the recent years are included in the new “average”, which should be done after 2010, the new average will be lower than the old average and then the recent years will not look so anomalous. It may even be that the high ice extent years might seem to be the odd ones.
In any case, 2007 and other low years will be closer to average then than they are currently. I don’t see a way for the “we are toast” crowd to put a good spin on this so, at best, they will likely try to ignore it or somehow change the rules.
Infection is the number one reason for mass die offs of all species including humans and should therefore be the starting point of any investigation like this.
I’ve often wondered how much infectious death and destruction is brought to these distant regions by adventurers, researchers, eco-film makers in their bilge, on their shoes, skin, etc. I’m fairly certain it is a lot more than a few acres of oil wells.
Phil if you were a walrus, in this scenario, what would you do?
Would you duck beneath the ice to avoid the rifle…or would you agree to be interviewed on Al Gore’s sequel movie?
Or would you just do your walrus thing and who knows how you would turn up?
I sure don’t…nor do I care…..nor do I care about the fate of these few organisms….in the larger backdrop of science.
Who gives a **** and why does it have any significance at all?
Balderdash.
No. Walrusdash.
Drop this…for something more grave and important.
The AP really is reaching for the dregs these days.
To be expected….
Chris Malendoski
Norfolk, VA, USA
mr.artday (21:22:35) :
“Do dead animals bleed from small wounds?”
The short answer – usually not. When an animal dies, the heart stops and diastolic pressure drops to being equal to atmospheric pressure. Blood pools in the major vessels and some organs at the lower extremities of the body. An animal that receives a superficial cut after death won’t bleed. However, a cut that goes deep enough might release pooled blood if the cut is low enough and of sufficient size and orientation to provide a drain path. On an animal laying horizontal, the cut line would have to be quite low as there isn’t a whole lot of blood in most mammals – somewhere between 4% to 7% of the entire body volume. Above the “pooling” line, the animal won’t bleed.
REPLY:Russian Coast? Svalbard is Norway.
Indeed it is but the large herds are found on the Russian coast (Chukchi sea etc.), the total population around Svalbard is about 1,500 as I recall.
John F. Hultquist (21:40:35) :
Phil needs to study the history of the Arctic Ocean ice – said history did not begin 30 years ago.
Oh I do, I take it you didn’t read the cite I gave about ice in 1922?
Some interesting fantasizing about the carcasses, tire tracks!
austin (22:10:33) :
Looks like a hunt to me.
I see footprints leading to each of the carcasses in the lead picture. There are also tireprints from a 4-wheeler and maybe a trailer in the lower left hand area and a straight line like something was drug in the upper part of the picture.
Those walruses were just killed
At least one high tide earlier I’d say.
“I seem to recall that dead bodies do not bleed. After the heart stops, blood tends to pool in the lowest region of the corpse. It’s really hard to see much detail in those photos, but I suspect there is too much blood visible to be the result of post-mortem wounds. I’m no expert on this however, and maybe some one with some medical background could post some facts for us rather than speculation….”
No speculation required,Robert. You are quite correct.Once the heart stops bating,there is ZERO pressure to push the blood anywhere.Gravity takes over,and the blood pools in the lowest areas.Any blood spotting caused by scavenging is strictly due to gravity,and is extremely minute,not even close to the amount shown in the pic. More science classes,and less hollywood BS,folks!
I’m wondering something else.
Could these wounds be puncture wounds from the tusks of the larger bull walrus stampeding toward the water?
They do use their tusks to haul themselves up and around so would they necessarily be careful where they are stabbing when they are scrambling for the water?
They’ve been doing nature programs about ocean mammals for about a half a century now. I used to watch a lot of them before they all decided to become mouthpieces for AGW propaganda. I can’t recall a single one that didn’t prominently feature footage of massively crowded breeding colonies and usually they included segments on pups who didn’t make it for one reason or another. One of Life’s more popular strategies for perpetuating itself is fecundity. Either individuals produce large numbers of young themselves or for species where that isn’t an option they all gather and breed at once, so that at the point of separation from the parent, when the young are most vulnerable, there will be so many running the gauntlet of awaiting predators who show up for these events, that enough survive to produce the next season’s sets of breeding pairs. Species who adopt this breeding strategy are always subject to losing young to reasons which relate to the crowded conditions the strategy demands. I would be seriously dubious of anecdotal reports that these deaths are exceptional.
“JLKrueger (21:04:15) :
Fair enough, but it still doesn’t rule out jerks simply killing the animals for fun either.
Jumping on “climate change” as the cause of death without any other evidence is still absurd.”
Agree with you absolutely. Why can’t people just say “I don’t know?”
Since Tony Fischback was on the scene to take the photo and is a walrus expert, I sent him an e-mail to ask for the facts and encourage him to leave a comment here… but he’s out of the office ’till Wednesday. Maybe he’ll respond and give us the straight dope.
“I’m wondering something else.
Could these wounds be puncture wounds from the tusks of the larger bull walrus stampeding toward the water?
They do use their tusks to haul themselves up and around so would they necessarily be careful where they are stabbing when they are scrambling for the water?” – Deborah (23:03:37)
I was wondering the same thing myself, which is why I googled for all the photographs I could find of walruses that were killed by stampede. None of the photographs I found showed bloodied carcasses. It seems that the blood didn’t come from tusk wounds or from being crushed. The amount and location of blood rules out predatory death. To kill a walrus requires a large predator capable of eating far more than than the small wounds shown in the photograph. I’m convinced that the animals shown in the photograph were shot.
Well, at least the spokesperson with the USFWS said as much. And that’s the real main point. We don’t know and we’re all guessing based on one low-res photo showing seven dead walruses, not hundreds of dead walruses.
Looking at other pictures of walruses crushed in stampedes, the beach is churned up around the carcasses (for example the picture in the AP story from 14 December 2007) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22260892/
That does not appear to be the case in the picture above.
I’m wondering why there’s no apparent attempt to at least verify the immediate cause of death. It doesn’t even appear from the report that the animals’ ages are certain.
I want to know why walrus deaths from unverified causes in an unusual event is urgent reason to build wind farms, when the wind farms themselves cause massive amounts of animal death and suffering on a continuing and predictable basis. See my reasoning for wind farm killings here: http://peacelegacy.org/articles/wind-farms-do-they-kill-birds.
One is forgiven for wondering if, in their minds the animal deaths simply don’t score any concern at all; and they are interested only in what mileage they think those deaths will bring for their cause. Let’s just watch as (as now seems likely) poaching is found to be the culprit, and we’ll see if the concern from these folk suddenly vanishes. I think we’ll see a litmus test for real versus fake wildlife lovers.
Same for the stranded whales: Always mankind is to blame, sometimes the evil “U.S. Army”.
Stranded whales were observed even by the ancient Greeks, so it’s something total natural.
This morbid “We are to blame” is so stupid.
It IS AGW, Anthropogenic Gunshot Wound.
To Anthony.
Thanks for putting things straight in a non-alarmist manner. It makes for both interessting and exiting reading when trying to cover a subject based on sober consideration.
To Bill McClure.
Could you please refer me to articles about the three legged frog-case. I want to know when the real cause of the frogs deformities were accepted as a scientificly proven fact.
Thanks.
I reckon it’s vampires – caused by global warming! (he-he)
—
Why pick on global warming? Propaganda and laziness.
I’ve heard people use a put-off to young children: “I can’t take you to the park today, ’cause I’ve got a bone in my leg.” The child usually gives up trying. The warmologues probably hope we will too.
Look at all the pictures, none of those animals are wearing a mask: It MUST be H1N1 !
Climate change has become the big cop out. In the documentary U.N Me we see representatives from Sudan blame the deaths of black Christian Sudanese on climate change instead of the Islamist Janjaweed backed by their government. The UN plays along happily because Sudan is in bed with China and al Qaeda, both of whom musnt be offended, and Copenhagen’s Climate treaty needs more hype. Thanks to Al Gore’s lie about Lake Chad we see the Janjaweed murder with impunity. Now climate change is beheading walruses and illegal poachers can run free.
You don’t need to take responsability for your actions now. Either blame George Bush or global warming, then recieve billions of dollars, a get out of jail free card, then carry on looting, murdering and terrorising. The UN and the looney left will bless your actions and say we must respect it!
“Retreating sea ice might have taken away some of the platforms walrus use to hunt and rest, pushing to walrus to shore.”
Walrus “hunt” clams and live on the shore very nicely, thank you. They particularly live very nicely on the shore during the *summer* — and it’s still summertime in Alaska.
I’m not an Alaskan wildlife expert, either, but Sibling Number Three just retired after a twenty-year stint with US Fish and Wildlife in Anchorage. He looked at the photo and said, “They all took head shots. Poachers.”