English: Walrus cows and yearlings resting on ice. The Walrus lives near relatively shallow water where it spends much of its time looking for benthic bivalve mollusks, its preferred diet. The Walrus is a social animal and spends much of its time on sea ice.

As sea ice thins and retreats farther north, walrus, which rely on sea ice to rest on between foraging bouts, and polar bears, which need sea ice to hunt seals, will either be displaced from essential feeding areas or forced to expend additional energy swimming to land-based haul-outs.