There was a post by Andreas T in the Arctic Wildlife topic wondering about walruses:
This is from one of the blogs by researchers on board the Oden north of Wrangell island.http://ciresblogs.colorado.edu/icebreaker/2014/08/11/feeding-frenzy-2/
I wonder whether it is normal for walrus to be so far from land? At the moment the ice they are on is heading north (not sure whether the coordinates give position where photos were taken or posted). Apart from being surrounded by polar bears, are these walruses on the way into trouble?
Since he asked this question quite a long time ago and I'm not sure whether anyone is checking that topic at this point, I thought I'd respond here. I hope that's not a violation of protocol -- let me know if it is.
Andreas, walruses strongly prefer to use sea ice rather than land as a resting and feeding platform for a variety of reasons. They also feel safer (and are, in fact, safer) when they're clustered closely together in a herd rather than being off by themselves. So the fact that these walruses were resting on floes of sea ice, bunched together, is not unusual and does not itself indicate they're in trouble. However, the less sea ice there is, the less likely that there's sufficient room for all walruses in an area to find a spot for resting. Regarding the location of those floes, and whether it means trouble for the walruses: 73N, 178E is still over the continental shelf, so it's fine for the walruses to be there. They feed on the seafloor in continental shelf regions, and they certainly can still dive down to the bottom at that particular location. But as sea ice progressively melts and shrinks northward toward the central polar basin, walruses will definitely be in big trouble. In my recent article about why the disappearance of sea ice matters(
http://www.lifeonthinice.org/data/web/JERoss_ArcticSeaIce_OceanGeographic_201410_LowRes.pdf), I included a long section about walruses that explains these issues in more detail.
As for the polar bears feeding on a kill in the same region there, I think it's quite unlikely that the kill was a walrus. It's extremely difficult and dangerous for a polar bear to try to kill a walrus, and only large adult male bears attempt it. It would be very rare for that to happen on sparse, small floes of sea ice. The most likely place for it to occur would be on land, when walruses are forced ashore in large numbers due to a lack of sea ice (and polar bears are as well). So that kill was almost certainly a seal.