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The walrus uses its tusks as starter sticks

Imagine: you weigh as much as a large car - a ton. You're in icy water, surrounded by ice. How do you get out? The walrus has found a solution: it has two long tusks that grow straight from its mouth down - up to 1 meter long! It sticks them into the ice floe and pulls itself up like you would on a horizontal bar.

The Latin name for a walrus is odobenus, which means «one who walks on his teeth.» Because for a walrus, tusks are a crane, an alpine pole, and a water starter. They also dig through the mud on the ocean floor, looking for shells.

The face of a walrus really resembles a wise old man: thick, wrinkled skin, a giant mustache, a serious look. But these mustaches are not just a decoration. They have 400-700 sensitive hairs! Each one is like a little finger. The walrus dives to the bottom (up to 90 meters), where it is dark and murky, and "feels" the mud with its mustache, looking for shells. In a day, one walrus finds and eats up to 4,000 shells!

The walrus doesn't chew. It sucks on the soft part of the shell like a straw, creating a vacuum in its mouth that causes the shell to open on its own. It's like sucking jelly out of a bag.

Interestingly, walruses are very social. They lie on ice floes in huge groups of 1,000 walruses - they keep warm together, because one on the ice floe will quickly freeze. They have "nannies": if the mother has gone hunting, another adult takes care of the baby.

Baby walruses suckle their mother's milk for 2 years — the longest among northern animals.