Activist: Build rafts for walruses

ANCHORAGE: An environmental activist is calling on the US Fish and Wildlife Service to reconsider placing anchored rafts in the ocean as resting platforms for walruses after stampedes killed 64 animals on Alaska’s northwest coast.

Rick Steiner, an environmental consultant and former University of Alaska marine conservation professor, pitched the idea two years ago.

The Fish and Wildlife Service concluded it did not have the money or manpower to provide artificial resting platforms that might give a few walruses relief but not benefit the population as a whole in the absence of ice in the Chukchi Sea.

Steiner said he’s again asking the agency to take the lead in a raft pilot project because sea ice continues to diminish and artificial platforms could provide alternatives to huge herds gathering on the Alaska coast.

“If it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work,” Steiner said on Friday.

“We know what doesn’t work: sitting around in an office looking at computer screens and having teleconferences expressing concerns about this.”

In recent decades, sea ice has diminished due to global warming and in late summer has receded far beyond the shallow continental shelf, in waters 3,050m deep.

Instead, walruses have gathered in Russia and Alaska, with 35,000 or more animals sometimes packed shoulder to shoulder on a beach.

If a herd is spooked by a polar bear, hunter, airplane or boat, calves can be crushed by mature females weighing more than a ton.

A survey on Sept 11 near the Inupiaq Eskimo village of Point Lay found 64 dead walruses. — AP

We know what doesn’t work: sitting around in an office looking at computer screens.

Rick Steiner