A remote village on the north-west coast of Alaska is being terrorised by raucous walruses.
Pacific walruses have come ashore by the thousands near the Inupiat village of Point Lay in recent years, last week alone saw around 6,000 arrive.
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The village is now attempting to deter the tourists who’ve been flocking to see the walruses, which are attracted by climate change and disappearing summer ice in the Chukchi Sea.
However, Point Lay, which has a population of 270, has no hotel or restaurants. And, to residents, walruses are a major food source, not a curiosity.
Disturbances by boats or aircraft can spook the animals into stampedes, so Point Lay is working with the US Fish and Wildlife Service on an information campaign: Thanks for the interest, but please don’t stop by.
‘They’ve had people come and had no place to accommodate them and they ended up having to tell the person to get back on the plane and head out,’ said Andrea Medeiros, spokeswoman for the agency in Anchorage.
‘You have to travel across a cove to get to where the animals are,’ Ms Medeiros said. Visitors would need to be driven by a resident and the trip can be hazardous.
‘They’re actually on a barrier island,’ she said.
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Walruses started coming ashore on the north-west Alaska coast in 2007. In September last year, 35,000 packed a rocky beach near Point Lay. The carcasses of more than 130 mostly young walruses were counted after a stampede in September 2009 at Icy Cape.
Walruses prefer spreading out on sea ice, where they can monitor the approach of predators such as polar bears.
Many adult male walruses stay south of the Bering Strait all year round. However, females with calves stay on the edge of pack ice, where the young can rest as mothers dive for clams.
As the sea ice melts, the edge moves north, providing a moving platform over the shallow Bering and Chukchi seas.
In recent years, as Arctic temperatures have warmed, the edge of the sea ice has receded far to the north over water too deep for the walruses to dive and reach the ocean bottom.
They have the choice of resting on ice over deep water or moving to shore, joined by thousands of other animals.
Remnant ice floating in the Chukchi gave the walruses a safe platform this year until last Friday, when about 6,000 of them went ashore near Point Lay.
They appear to have since moved on, probably to Russia, Joel Garlich-Miller, a walrus biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a statement on Tuesday.
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