♪♪ -Some creatures alive today almost feel like they belong to a prehistoric past.

I once had a dream full of saber-toothed animals -- saber-toothed cats, saber-toothed deer, saber-toothed salmon.

And amongst those animals was a saber-toothed seal, the walrus.

There's something about walrus.

An animal we all recognize... yet one that few have ever seen.

This is like a dream come true, it's unbelievable.

Their lives revolve around sea ice in ways we are only just beginning to understand.

A lot of digging and not so many clams.

As Arctic temperatures rise, I wonder how walruses will cope in an ice-free world and how baby orphans like this one...will survive.

-[ Barking ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -You see anything, Randy?

-Mm... It might take a little while to bump into something.

-Looking out across the last of the spring sea ice, I feel the fragility of the Arctic.

I'm a paleontologist and I oversee the world's largest natural history collection... ...a constant reminder that 99% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct.

Now the Arctic is warming so rapidly, I'm increasingly worried about the future of an animal close to my heart -- the walrus.

They gonna have the little babies with them now?

-Yeah, they've still got babies with them.

-I'm desperate to see a walrus, but they can be very hard to find.

I've seen them before on land but never on sea ice, which turns into a giant jigsaw puzzle as it breaks up in spring.

-[ Crash ] -Whoa.

[ Laughs ] Gotta watch out for those ice cubes.

Although Randy and his two buddies, who are Alaskan natives, don't seem too fazed.

-Hear them from miles away.

-Oh, really?

-Yeah.

-Does it go -- sound go further than the smell?

-Hmm, yeah, you can -- you can hear them before you smell them.

♪♪ -I think I see a walrus.

-Females.

♪♪ [ Camera shutter clicks ] Do you smell them now?

-Yeah.

[ Laughs ] Pretty stinky.

-I think there's, like, 50 of them up there.

-Oh, really?

Yeah, look at that, there they are.

♪♪ Alright, now we're talking.

♪♪ ♪♪ One thing I love about walrus is that they're very social animals.

Herds of females, some with calves, huddle tightly together on ice floes.

Is that a pup over there?

Could be a little pup next to the mom.

♪♪ What a cute baby.

♪♪ Pups are born on the ice in spring.

They rely on their mom's milk for up to two years.

During this time, they share an unbreakable bond.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Walruses grunting softly ] Check out these guys over there, a bunch of juveniles hanging out together with much smaller tusks.

This is like a dream come true, it's unbelievable.

Sitting out in the middle of the Bering Sea, on a floating chunk of ice.

These walrus make all sorts of cool sounds.

It's [imitating walrus] sound, which is kind of like the "get off my little tiny piece of ice" sound, I think.

-[ Grunts ] -There it is.

It's kind of funny, though, because they love being really close together and pile on top of each other, but they hate it, too.

They're always pushing each other and coming out with each of their tusks and stuff like that, like brothers and sisters fighting in a weird way.

It's like there's all the ice in the world, and they're just fighting over a little piece of ice.

♪♪ Little baby walruses are very vulnerable to all this jostling, so mothers protect them by spreading out on the ice floes.

These islands of ice are their sanctuaries.

It's kind of an amazing paradise as the sea ice becomes a moveable platform on which young families of walruses can move along, and it's like a whole fleet of little boats moving north.

So, if I was a walrus, I could just lie down on this piece of ice and enjoy my life and I'd just be motoring north where I wanted to go.

Right below me on the bottom of the seafloor, plenty of clams.

Life is good.

And it's a beautiful day in the Bering Sea.

Down!

[ Laughs ] To survive on the sea ice, the walrus pups stay very close to their moms.

♪♪ But occasionally one turns up alone... sometimes in the strangest of places.

Back in June of 2017, a couple of goldminers were working right off the coast of Nome and they were surprised to find a little baby walrus hiding in a box on the deck.

Such a cute little animal, about the size of a big, fat dog.

And it didn't want to go anywhere.

Its mom was nowhere to be seen.

They took this great video of this thing.

Look at that guy, that is not a happy little walrus.

He's just looking pretty sad, he's moving very slow, he's just kind of rubbing his muzzle against the barrel and, like, "What's going on?"

Looking for some walrus milk, it looks like.

You can tell he's dehydrated.

Cute little guy.

But they did the right thing and the guys called the local authorities and transferred him down to the SeaLife Center in Seward, Alaska.

-Okay, lift.

Alright, bring that cart closer.

-The Alaska SeaLife Center is the only place in the country to take in baby walruses.

10 orphans have come through its doors since it opened in 1998 and now they have a new one.

-Do you want to come on out?

-This one-week-old baby was discovered alone on a beach in the far north of Alaska in 2024.

She's covered in scratches and puncture wounds, probably from rolling around on the rocky beach.

-Ooh!

-Oh, got that on you.

-Got you too.

-Oh, yeah!

-She's a snotty-nosed kid.

[ Laughter ] That's one way to get a sample.

-[ Barking ] -I'm pretty confident this calf would not have made it.

She was clearly alone for a period of time.

She was already malnourished.

But the biggest sigh of relief I had was her being good about taking food from a bottle.

It makes a world of difference.

-It's a critical time for this baby walrus.

Three of their previous orphans were so ill that they died.

♪♪ For me, the big question is whether this orphan's plight might be linked to changes in its Arctic home.

Most of the world's walrus, some 250,000 of them, live in the frigid seas between Russia and Alaska.

Adults breed during the winter in areas of open water on the southern edge of the sea ice.

As the ice begins to melt in spring, females and their calves drift north on their ice floes, through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic Ocean.

The males stay south and head to land.

One of their favorite spots is Round Island.

♪♪ ♪♪ Round Island is a remote, ethereal place I've always wanted to return to.

I was last here in 1985.

It's so amazing to be back here because these walruses stuck their selves in my mind like a -- a mind worm or something like that.

In my early 20s, I was working as a marine geologist, investigating the feeding grounds of walrus.

And it was here on Round Island where I had my first encounter.

It was love at first sight.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Wind blowing ] [ Walruses making chiming noises ] I wake up to a mysterious chiming... almost like church bells.

It feels like the walrus are welcoming me back to the island.

♪♪ A lot of these walrus do seem to be having kind of a social time with their friends.

When two of them approach each other, they go right face-to-face and their little fuzzy muzzles come together, like a kiss, almost, hello.

Those whiskers are very tactile and very sensitive.

They're actually feeling each other's face, and I guess saying, "Hey, you're a walrus, too.

I'm a walrus."

And who knows what other information they're transferring.

Walruses make their chimes by moving air around sacs in their neck.

Their air sacs also serve as life jackets, allowing them to take naps while at sea.

So it's funny.

It looks like a bunch of pinkish-brown corks bobbing around a bunch of rocks.

They look like they're dead, but they're just asleep.

And you watch them for 10 or 15 minutes and finally they'll put their head up and blow a little bit of air out, take a breath and go back to sleeping.

♪♪ This is the oldest wildlife sanctuary in Alaska.

When hunting was banned here in 1960, Round Island became a safe haven for walrus.

♪♪ Seabirds flock here in their tens of thousands to nest on the cliff faces.

Check out this sweet little parakeet auklet.

At the south end of the island, Steller sea lions cavort in the waves.

Their bellies are full after feasting on herring.

They are so much more frisky than their walrus cousins.

They prefer to hang out on their own beach on the north side of the island.

♪♪ ♪♪ It's an amazing spot.

We're on the edge of Round Island and looking out at this point and there's about 300 walruses hauled out on the beach, sleeping together.

For the next couple of months, these walrus will be doing what they're doing now, which is not a whole lot.

And that's what Round Island is -- a place for these males to chill, or rather warm up, after a strenuous winter breeding season.

Their spring break and summer vacation, all rolled into one.

♪♪ This one right now actually is lying on his back with his tusks straight up in the air and his -- and his flippers out.

It's a pretty non-stressful life for the walrus around Round Island.

Wake up in the morning, go for a swim with a couple of your buddies, crawl out on a rock, sleep some more, go back to the beach, sleep some more.

Life is good.

♪♪ When I was here last, almost 40 years ago, there were a lot more walruses on the beach.

It makes me wonder why numbers are down today.

During the spring and summer, two wardens live on Round Island and monitor walrus arrivals and departures.

You guys are here for three and a half months by yourselves.

-Yeah.

-What's life on the island like?

-This is my personal happy place.

I mean, you get to be on this remote island where there's not a lot of human activity, quiet, you can just be with your thoughts and surrounded by nature.

-It's really a sort of connection with a place and a natural place that it's easy to not have in our lives and that's pretty magical.

-So, you count the walruses every day.

-Yes.

-So, there's nine beaches that we count every day, either us going in person or using cameras that we keep on the island that actually take pictures of all the haulouts.

-Over winter, Round Island is locked in by sea ice... ...but it quickly opens up to visitors after the spring thaw.

-We usually see the arrival of walruses here any time between starting as early as February or March.

We start seeing our peak numbers towards the end of July through potentially September.

-And what's a big count for you?

-Most years, we'll have a bunch of days over 1,000, and a few days that are 2,000 or 3,000.

-Watching walruses move all at once makes me think of them more like a single entity.

One day they're here and the next they're gone.

Walrus come and go from Round Island every few days, sometimes to escape heavy surf, to feast on clams and sometimes to visit a thermal spa on the nearby mainland.

The black sand here absorbs energy from the sun and heats up as the day goes on -- just what's needed after a cold dip.

The tightly packed huddle keeps them all warm, but newcomers aren't always welcome.

The strange lumps around big males' necks helps protect them from tuskings by rival males.

They're called bosses and are a sign of maturity, like a lion's mane.

The older the walrus, the bossier it gets.

-Those bosses -- the lady walruses think that they're -- they're sexy.

[ Laughs ] -I've heard it's good eating.

-Really?

-It's like gristle.

-Almost like crackling.

-Oh, my goodness, walrus crackling.

-Like pigskin.

[- Laughter ] -One thing our position here on the island all summer has allowed us to observe is the way sounds can cause disturbance.

When you're sitting up there counting and you hear a commercial jet go over, you can see sometimes it will cause a stampede or a disturbance.

[ Jet engine roaring ] -They have really poor eyesight, so they rely heavily on what the rest of the herd is doing.

Sounds, airplanes, gunshots, boats, bears... -Foxes.

-Foxes?

-There's a lot of little things, even if it's nothing, a rock falling, it can cause thousands of walruses to -- Yeah, flee to the water.

And it's the older animals and the younger ones that get trampled and killed or injured.

-Baby walrus avoid being crushed by living on the sea ice with their moms.

♪♪ -You got it.

-This one ended up on a beach separated from its mother.

-There you go.

-After a few days' rehab at the Alaska SeaLife Center, Little Miss Walrus as she's being called, seems to be doing well.

-Three, two, one.

[ X-ray machine beeps ] -They do a sneaky X-ray while she feeds.

-Three, two, one.

[ X-ray machine beeps ] -Fortunately, there's no broken bones.

-The most challenging part of this cow's rehabilitation is just the unknown.

These are very young, very sensitive animals and we don't know at any point could she get sick for a reason.

-Great job.

You're doing so great!

-Now you get to have fun if you want to have fun.

-Like most babies, Little Miss Walrus should enjoy a bath.

♪♪ -All she could do at that moment in time was just put her head in 'cause she was just so tired.

But the fact that we're able to introduce her to water and the fact that she took to it right away... just seeing her really explore and really love that water was really heartwarming.

Oop, thank you.

[ Laughs ] -Baby walrus need round-the-clock care and there's no shortage of volunteers flying in to help.

-We're a lot of moms.

[ Laughs ] She has about 10 or 12 different moms.

It's also just giving her the kind of social experience.

We're actually sitting with her and getting her that close contact that she would need.

We can tell already she's a fighter and that's what you need when you have an animal that you are rescuing and rehabilitating is they've got to put in some of the effort themselves, too, and we're giving her everything that we can and she's actually responding to it and that's amazing.

-Little Miss Walrus has become highly dependent on her surrogate moms.

She can never be released back into the wild.

She would not survive.

Instead, she will be moved to a much larger SeaLife center where hopefully she'll make friends with other walruses.

-Dozer!

Hi, buddy!

-Dozer is a sight to behold -- a 3,500-pound adult male in his prime.

-Alright.

-Wow!

-He was born at SeaWorld San Diego and is now 31 years old.

We just celebrated his birthday with tons of clams and a large frozen ice cake.

Do you want to give him a fish?

-Yeah, hell yeah.

-Alright, there you go, right up to his mouth.

-Alright, Dozer.

-Super easy.

-It's like straight in.

-Don't take my job, okay?

[ Laughter ] -His breath isn't bad actually.

I thought he'd have awful breath.

-Their breath is not too bad.

It's the other end that, you know... [ Laughter ] -Dozer has an impressive appetite and, like all walrus, is a virtuoso vocalist.

-[ Clicking ] [ Grunts ] -There we go.

-[ Laughter ] -[ Spits ] [ Laughter ] [ Whistles ] -Wow.

That whistle is great!

-It's amazing, isn't it?

-It's only when you're this close to a fully grown walrus that you can really appreciate how big, weird and wonderful these animals truly are.

Bulbous eyes, which allow them to see behind their head, giant saber-toothed tusks that can grow 3 feet long, and that great moustache... -[ Grunts ] -...packed with sensitive whiskers, the vibrissae.

-They're using those whiskers to really comb the floor, find where their food is.

They are very helpful tools.

They can move them all independently.

Just like 700 fingers right on the front of your face.

So if you ever turn out the lights in your home... -Yeah.

-...and you're just feeling around, he's definitely good at doing that.

[ Laughs ] -Wow, amazing.

How much are you feeding him a day right now?

-Right now about 125 pounds a day.

-That's a pretty healthy meal.

[ Laughter ] -Oh, boy.

-Walrus will never go hungry here.

But in the wild, it's a different story.

-So you guys all found your seatbelts.

Alright, with that, we'll be off.

♪♪ Wow.

What a fabulous day to fly, man.

-This is gorgeous.

Warmer summers may be making it harder for walrus to find enough food.

I'm heading to a beach to dig deeper into their diet.

What a beautiful spot this is.

It is so glassy out here.

-It really is today.

-It's a perfect day for clamming, and who better to take me than Willy, who sports a moustache that any walrus would be proud of.

There is a seal or two down there now.

-Well, we're gonna see a whole bunch of sea otters in the kelp on the back side of this island here.

-Alright.

-Coming up on our left there.

-Oh, my God.

Look at them all.

-They're all waving at us.

-[ Laughs ] ♪♪ Low tide has exposed a seafood platter on the beach, and there are plenty of creatures looking to join the feast.

♪♪ It looks like he's got a little eel there.

Cute little guy, isn't he?

♪♪ The tricky thing about finding clams is they burrow deep to hide from predators.

A lot of digging and not so many clams.

♪♪ Grizzly bears love clams, too.

They have the advantage of an incredible sense of smell.

Fortunately, this one is too busy clamming to care about me.

♪♪ The fox is hoping for leftovers, but the bear's not happy to share.

♪♪ Ahh!

There we go.

Look at that guy.

This is what the bears are after -- big, fat, juicy clams.

And when they get them, what they do is they actually press down and crack the shells and lick the clam meat out of the shells.

And the bears go for clams during the low tides and the walruses are going after clams that are in water depths of anywhere from a few feet to maybe 200 feet deep and they go after them in a different way.

People used to think that walrus used their tusks to dig for clams like bears use their claws, but we now know they use their tongue like a piston to squirt a powerful jet of water that blasts away the mud to expose the buried clams.

And they use their super-sensitive whiskers to find their tasty treasure.

So, what the walrus does is it literally puts the clam in its lips like that and then sucks and the walrus sucks at least the siphon out of the clam and sometimes the entire clam body.

Then they'll spit the empty shell back onto the bottom of the seafloor and go for another clam.

And some walruses, like the ones we saw in Round Island, can do something like 5,000 clams a day.

So, if you do a quick thumbnail calculation, there's around 250,000 walruses eating 5,000 clams each, that's well over a billion clams a day.

It's hard to believe there could be so much life in this desolate ice world.

But sea ice hides an incredible secret.

♪♪ Living on the underside of the ice are millions of microscopic organisms, sea ice algae.

They harness energy from the sun to grow, just like grass.

♪♪ ♪♪ The animals that graze here are tiny, shrimp-like creatures called amphipods.

Predators then eat the amphipods, and the food chain continues.

♪♪ ♪♪ Ice algae is also essential to life on the seafloor.

When the ice melts, the algae sinks to the bottom and feeds other animals, including clams that walrus depend on.

♪♪ The Arctic is almost like going to a different planet.

The same with the Antarctic.

When you go to the polar regions, you experience things you just never see when you're in mid latitudes.

You see sun that doesn't set in the summer and doesn't rise in the winter.

And yet there's these areas of incredibly high biological productivity, and the life that you see in the Arctic, whether it's walruses or seals or whales or seabirds or caribou or moose, it's just like a remarkable place.

♪♪ Arctic terns chase the midnight sun their whole lives.

They fly all the way from Antarctica to breed in Alaska, swapping one summer for another.

♪♪ The lifecycle of sea ice is also driven by the sun.

The cool thing about ice in the Arctic is that it takes a while to form, but it can go away very rapidly.

The freeze-up is a gradual thing and the thaw can be very abrupt.

As the sea ice melts, it leaves behind a growing expanse of dark water that absorbs more energy from the sun.

The warmer water melts the remaining ice even faster, and as Arctic summers become warmer, more and more sea ice is disappearing.

It's been called the Arctic Death Spiral.

♪♪ This is kind of personal for me because when I came up here in 1982, there was a lot of sea ice.

And now 42 years later, we've lost a third of the summer sea ice.

So just in my own personal memory of the Arctic, we've lost about a million square miles of summer ice.

And you have to imagine that that's gonna have some impact on the walrus.

♪♪ ♪♪ When I was doing my research back in the '80s, I was using side-scan sonar to locate walrus feeding grounds.

These are on the shallow continental shelf that bridges Russia and Alaska.

Here, the rich seafloor contains vast clam beds, a marine version of the great plains' grasslands.

Walrus mothers and calves depend on the moving sea ice to carry them over this rich source of food.

But now, as the sea ice melts farther north, if they stay on their platforms, they will be carried beyond the continental shelf, into deep water and deep trouble.

The walrus is not gonna dive 8,000 feet down to eat clams.

It's used to diving down 200 feet to eat clams, so once the ice is off the edge of the continental shelf, it's not a useful tool for the walrus.

♪♪ To survive, they must abandon their ice floes and head for land, and they do so in extraordinary numbers.

♪♪ ♪♪ Over 100,000 walrus gather on a single beach in the far northeast of Russia.

It's the largest haulout in the world.

♪♪ In the past, far fewer came here.

For many years, there were none at all.

Today finding an empty spot on the beach is a bit of a struggle.

Females and calves make up over half the haulout.

It's a far cry from their peaceful life on an ice floe.

-[ Grunts ] -[ Barking ] -The biggest danger to a calf is being squashed by another walrus.

Staying close to Mom -- ideally on top of her -- is the safest place to be.

But not everyone survives the crush.

A new orphan... another victim of a disappearing ice world.

♪♪ Few orphans are as lucky as Little Miss Walrus.

After a month at the Alaska SeaLife Center, things are looking up.

-Her skin's looking much better.

Things are starting to heal, and she has energy.

We now have what was a sick, weak animal becoming very animated.

-Since she arrived here, Little Miss Walrus has put on 60 pounds.

She's ready to make a bigger splash.

-Come here.

There you go.

-Whoa!

-Yay!

♪♪ -She really likes to do this little throw yourself into the pool backwards thing.

And the look on her face was just, like, pure bliss.

♪♪ -This orphan's rehabilitation is nearing its end.

It's time to move her to a permanent home.

-There's only four facilities in the United States that house walruses.

Ultimately, we all came into a consensus that SeaWorld Orlando would be the best place for her at this time.

A big part of it is because they have the most walruses in human care.

-Transporting a baby walrus all the way across a continent is not an everyday occurrence.

What do you even pack?

Plenty of milk for sure.

Before she leaves Alaska, Little Miss Walrus is given a new name.

-Uki is a shortened version of ukiaq, which means autumn in the language from the land she came from, which was the lands of the Iñupiaq people.

And it just so happens if you shorten that name a little bit into Uki, that means survivor.

-Alright, let's get a bottle ready.

Let's get her in the kennel.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -Oh!

Yum.

It's okay.

[ Speaks indistinctly ] ♪♪ Good job!

She's, like, part of the family.

And so it's gonna be definitely sad, like, coming in to work tomorrow and she's not gonna be here and I'm gonna have to clean up all her toys.

Bye, I love you!

But it's for the best.

Like, this is the best outcome for her.

Like, she didn't have any chance on that beach and so we are giving her a second life.

-Happy trails, little girl.

-I know.

-Goodbye, sweet girl.

Oh!

♪♪ ♪♪ -For a walrus in the wild, there's a mounting problem.

As more and more walrus haul out on land, they quickly exhaust nearby clam beds.

And without ice floes to carry them, females have to spend more time swimming to new feeding grounds.

If they lose weight, it could lead to lower birth rates, smaller calves and potentially even a population crash.

A shortage of food also affects other animals that cruise these shores.

When I first came to Alaska in the 1980s, it wasn't just walrus that I was studying, I was also studying gray whales.

And the reason for that was that both of these animals are benthic feeders, they feed on the sediment in the seafloor.

Gray whales are the only whales to feed this way.

They aren't after clams, but arthropods and other crustaceans that live in the seafloor.

They're eating by scooping up big sections of the seafloor and they billow that sand and silt out of their mouths leaving behind this great big plume of muddy water, and in their mouths retain the actual prey item.

♪♪ Gray whales migrate all the way from Mexico to feed in the same rich waters as walrus, making pitstops along the way like here off Kodiak Island.

-This is a critical habitat area for gray whales and before the unusual mortality events started and even the first couple of years, if we were standing here at this time of year, it would be like smoke stacks going off and just... -Whales everywhere.

-...seeing all of the whales spouting.

-After a record-low ice cover in the winter of 2017, large numbers of gray whales began stranding along their migratory route, including several on Kodiak Island.

It's thought that around 5,000 whales died over 4 years, a population crash of 25%.

It appears that many of them actually starved to death.

-We're able to do a blubber biopsy basically just to see the thickness of the blubber.

It was really, really tough to cut through and it was only about that thick.

-Wow!

-It should have been about like that.

-These are the animals that would have been down to Baja and were headed back up to the Bering Sea and just... -Exactly, yeah.

-...couldn't make it.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Kind of like the long walk for food and they just ran out of food and... -They just ran out of gas and they couldn't quite make it.

-So insights in the gray whales will help us understand what's going on with walrus?

-Quite possibly and all of the change that's occurring ultimately have a huge impact and cause ripples throughout the entire ocean.

-How far these ripples will spread is uncertain.

But ripple they will.

Less sea ice means less sea ice algae and less sea ice algae means an ecosystem starved of vital food.

♪♪ ♪♪ The intricate connections of life put all the animals that live here at risk, including our walrus.

♪♪ The most pessimistic climate models suggest that the Arctic could have a completely ice-free day as early as 2027.

It's hard to imagine walrus surviving in an ice-free world.

Unlike seals and sea lions, who live both in cold and warm coastal waters, walrus only live in the Arctic.

♪♪ But if you go back in time far enough, walrus have a surprising history.

I've come to visit an old friend.

Tom's another big walrus fan.

-Hey, Kirk.

-How are you, man?

-There's one skull I wanted to show you.

But, uh, I can't... [ Laughs ] I can't figure out where -- where we put it.

-Oh, the embarrassment of riches problem.

Although there's only one walrus species alive today, over the past 17 million years, there's been at least 20.

The earliest had no tusks and looked more like a sea lion.

Eventually they took on a more recognizable form.

-I think I know where it is.

-Oh, that is amazing, look at that!

It's great.

-This is a skull of an adult Valenictus chulavistensis, about three and a half million years old, from here in the San Diego area.

-So what are we looking -- We've got the left tusk.

-Right and here's the orbit, so the eye's there.

-Okay.

-This big hole here is where the nerves would come out to feed that moustache.

-Oh, all the whiskers, yeah, okay.

This is amazing because it's -- There -- I can see some differences, but it really is a walrus with big tusks and clearly a suction feeder.

-Yeah, everything about it suggests that it's feeding like a modern walrus.

So, what's the difference?

This animal that lived here in San Diego three and a half million years ago was not living in any way with ice, so this was an animal that was adapted to warm waters here.

-That's pretty cool.

This lineage lived very happily in a world with no ice at all.

Anything we think about modern walruses, we have to put it in the context of there was an animal very like it living in San Diego three and a half million years ago, and that changes the way I think about a walrus.

Walrus in California?

Who would have thought.

Walrus evolved as warm-water animals, long before they made the Arctic their home.

Perhaps within their DNA, they retain some sort of resilience to survive in an ice-free world.

But I really hope it doesn't come to that.

♪♪ I've come to check out Uki's new home.

There are 12 walruses in aquariums across the United States and half of them live here at SeaWorld Orlando.

These are going to be Uki's new buddies.

♪♪ Uki's been kept away from the other walruses since she arrived here four months ago, and she seems happy as a clam.

-Uki!

That's a good girl.

Hi.

-She's recently out of quarantine, which means she's finally accepting visitors.

-[ Laughs ] Hello.

How's it going?

Welcome.

It's very nice to see you.

-Come on, Uki.

Come on.

-She's like an excitable little puppy that wants to follow me everywhere.

Come on.

-Let's go, guys.

-Let's go.

Yeah, that is so cute.

[ Laughs ] Come on, Uki.

There we go, up and running.

♪♪ Ever since Uki was found alone on that beach, she's only ever had humans for company.

So, how's she gonna react when she meets an adult walrus in the pool next door?

♪♪ Kaboodle is a 21-year-old female.

Her crisscross tusks look a little menacing.

Come on, Uke.

-Good job.

-Come on.

-Come on, Uki.

-Let's go round the corner.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Speaks indistinctly ] Introducing Uki to Kaboodle has to be a carefully choreographed operation.

Uki's still a vulnerable toddler.

Here we go.

-Uki.

-Oh, yeah.

You can go and talk to Kaboodle.

No, you like me.

-Take my other bottle.

-Give Kaboodle a talk.

Yeah, there we go.

The best way to encourage walruses to bond -- over food, of course.

-She gets bottles that include fish fillets that are ground up... -Uh-huh.

-...and some clams that are ground up in the blender.

-Clam milkshake, basically.

-Yeah, it's good.

-[ Laughs ] Delicious.

♪♪ That's gonna be your new surrogate mom there.

-Yeah!

So that's what we're seeing mostly is lots of kisses and little, you know... -Almost sound like a kiss.

it sounds like little... -Yeah.

But just even being in here and listening to the other walruses is all part of the transition.

-That's what I'm saying.

[ Laughs ] Kaboodle is the perfect mom for Uki.

She's been a surrogate to a rescued orphan before.

The bond between them will grow stronger by the day, but right now Uki just wants to play.

♪♪ Hup, here she comes.

[ Laughs ] -She clearly.

is having a good time.

-Yeah, I think we have a bond, me and Uki.

-That's good.

-What a beautiful little walrus baby.

Oh, my God.

How lovely is that?

-[ Snorts ] -Uki will always feel at ease with people.

Soon she'll be back with other walrus, too.

A life dependent on human care, but at least her future is secure.

♪♪ ♪♪ As sea ice diminishes more and more each year, the fate of walrus in the wild is increasingly uncertain.

♪♪ ♪♪ In the future, they will not just face a shortage of food and safe places to raise their pups... they will face a new threat.

The more the Arctic Ocean opens up, the more this once-pristine wilderness becomes vulnerable.

♪♪ Walrus evolved in an ice-free past.

Let's hope they can survive in an ice-free future.

♪♪ ♪♪ (music plays through credits) NARRATOR: To learn more about what you've seen on this Nature program, visit PBS.org