Tremendous surprise for a father and daughter who were walking along Glanleam beach, in County Kerry, in the southwest of Ireland, when they saw a large walrus, an animal that is not found in the region , resting on a rock on the coast.
The event occurred in March 2021 but again on social networks has been revived in order to try to raise awareness about climate change.
Immediately, police and experts in this type of fauna arrived at the site to help the walrus, which was in a state of “extreme exhaustion”.
They soon got down to business to investigate how the walrus had come to this site. Kevin Flannery, director of the Dingle Oceanworld Aquarium, the largest aquarium in Ireland and close to the site of this curious and worrying discovery, explained in an interview to EFE one of the theories that were released regarding this situation.
According to Flannery, the walrus, a young male as big as a bull, “fell asleep on an iceberg” that, as a result of the melting, broke off the Greenland shelf, making a trip, totally unconscious, of more than 2,500 kilometers away.
In the same way , the director of the Dingle Oceanworld Aquarium explained that, perhaps, the Gulf Stream could have transported the block of ice to the coast of County Kerry from “somewhere in Greenland”, where “they feed mainly on Icelandic clams”.
Another hypothesis raises the possibility that this semi-aquatic mammal, about 2 meters long and with tusks of about 30 centimeters, became disoriented while following Russian and Norwegian ships in North Atlantic waters.
“Undoubtedly, nature is sending us warnings about the consequences of the environmental crisis and the impact of human activities”, he explained.
The first official sighting of a walrus off the Irish coast occurred in 1897, but another specimen was not seen again until the last decade of the 80 and, since then, , “some 20 animals have appeared,” said the expert.
“The best thing now is to leave her alone. No rescue should be attempted. The walrus, once it can feed again and recover its strength, will undertake the journey back home on its own, ”explained the specialist.
“ Be that as it may, it is a worrying event because it is either due to climate change or it could be a consequence of the overexploitation suffered by our seas”, he stated.
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