Huge Pacific Walrus Swimming

See this huge animal swimming in a tank filmed in HD quality!

The walrus (Odobenus rosmarus) is a large flippered marine mammal with a discontinuous circumpolar distribution in the Arctic Ocean and sub-Arctic seas of the Northern Hemisphere. The walrus is the only living species in the Odobenidae family and Odobenus genus. It is subdivided into three subspecies: the Atlantic Walrus (O. rosmarus rosmarus) which lives in the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Walrus (O. rosmarus divergens) which lives in the Pacific Ocean, and O. rosmarus laptevi, which lives in the Laptev Sea.

The walrus is immediately recognized by its prominent tusks, whiskers and great bulk. Adult Pacific males can weigh up to 2,000 kilograms (4,400 lb) and, among pinnipeds, are exceeded in size only by the two species of elephant seals. It resides primarily in shallow oceanic shelf habitat, spending a significant proportion of its life on sea ice in pursuit of its preferred diet of benthic bivalve mollusks. It is a relatively long-lived, social animal and is considered a keystone species in Arctic marine ecosystems.

The walrus has played a prominent role in the cultures of many indigenous Arctic peoples, who have hunted the walrus for its meat, fat, skin, tusks and bone. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the walrus was the object of heavy commercial exploitation for blubber and ivory and its numbers declined rapidly. Its global population has since rebounded, though the Atlantic and Laptev populations remain fragmented and at historically depressed levels.
The origin of walrus has variously been attributed to combinations of the Dutch words walvis ("whale") and ros ("horse") or wal ("shore") and reus ("giant"). However, the most likely origin of the word is the Old Norse hrossvalr, meaning "horse-whale", which was passed in an inverted form to Dutch and the North-German dialects as walros and Walross.

The now archaic English word for walrus—morse—is widely supposed to have come from the Slavic.Thus морж (morž) in Russian, mursu in Finnish, moršâ in Saami, and morse in French. Olaus Magnus, who depicted the walrus in the carta marina in 1539, first referred to it as the ros marus, likely a Latinization of morž, and this was adopted by Linnaeus in the binomial nomenclature. The coincidental similarity between "morsus" and the Latin for "death" (mors) and "to bite" (mordere) supposedly contributed to the walrus' reputation as a "terrible monster".

The compound Odobenus comes from odous (Greek for "tooth") and baino (Greek for "walk"), based on walrus observations using their tusks to pull themselves out of the water. The term divergens in Latin means "turning apart", referring to the tusks.

Category:

Pets & Animals

Tags:

• Huge
• Pacific
• Walrus
• Swimming

[ladytrue90]

wow they r big!