Walruses Show Sportive Spirit by Playing with Seabirds, Experts Wonder at their “Ghastly Playing Behavior”

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Walrus do not mind their heavy weight but they play with birds at the sea with no "killing" intentions but in a way that displays a sportive spirit in this huge marine mammal. The 1.5-ton walrus has "real" playful tactics to enjoy the birds that come in abundance over the sea.  

The "play behavior" of the mammal is observed to be pretty ghastly as compared to its size but still their "game" does not show any intentions of killing those birds that they play with. The animal sneak up on the birds that float on the surface perching on an ice berg and scares them away with a sudden slash of their tusks, reports WB News.

Bird carcasses that fall from the claws of other preying birds flying over also become an interesting playing object of walruses at the sea.   The energetic animals pull the carcasses under water and wait for them to emerge on the surface and then repeat the interesting "drown and emerge" game several times that it can reach up to eight times in a row.

Researchers observed 71 wild Pacific walruses play with 74 seabirds in the Chukchi Sea. Most of the times the walruses pay little attention to the nearby flying or floating birds but these are the young playful walruses that find it a great sport to play with birds according to Mail Online.

Almost 82% of the playing encounters between the walruses and birds are initiated by the young mammals. The behavior seems bizarre to the people but it seems that this heavy-weight animal has found a way to rejuvenate his life at the sea by "playing with birds."

The journal Acta Ethologica has published the study of mammals' behavior that they approach the birds on surface and splash, emerge from the water and hit and attack from below.

The game does not seem to be aggressive as National Geographic writes because only one bird got killed which clarifies the confusion in minds that walrus attacks the birds with an intention of killing them. They even find it okay to play with the carcasses that are washed in by the waves or fall dead in the sea.

The study co-author Andrey Giljov, a zoologist at St. Petersburg University, told National Geographic that the reason behind this behavior of walruses is the same that other animals also like to play.