Walrus Trivia
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60 free Walrus trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This walrus trivia quiz covers the biology of the Arctic's biggest tusked mammal: what Odobenus ('tooth-walker') means, why the word walrus is 'whale-horse' inside out, how heavy Pacific bulls get, what the tusks are really for, how the whiskers find clams and the piston tongue sucks them out, the throat air sac it sleeps in, the 15-16 month pregnancy, and the two animals brave enough to hunt it. It also covers walruses and people: Inuit and Chukchi hunting and myth, the Lewis Chessmen carved from walrus ivory, the 19th-century slaughter and the recovery on Svalbard, the wandering celebrities Wally, Freya, Stena and Thor, and the walrus in Lewis Carroll, Kipling and the Beatles. Every question was verified against a primary reference (mainly the Wikipedia article on the walrus) and carries a citation. Play it with our polar bear, Arctic and ocean animal quizzes.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the walrus's scientific name?
Odobenus rosmarus
Odobenus rosmarus. Linnaeus first filed the walrus with the seals, under Phoca, in 1758 and later moved it in with the manatees.
Q 02What is the term for a walrus leaving the water to rest on ice or land?
Hauling out
Hauling out. Walruses seldom do it alone: herds of thousands pack a beach or an ice floe side by side, and the crush of bodies helps each animal hold on to its heat.
Q 03The walrus's genus name comes from Greek words meaning what?
Tooth-walker
Tooth-walker. The name records the sight of a walrus hooking its tusks into the ice and heaving its bulk up out of the water.
Q 04The Dutch word behind 'walrus' is usually read as meaning what?
Whale-horse
Whale-horse. Dutch seems to have flipped an older Norse name, 'horse-whale', and Old English had the same idea in its own word for the animal, horschwael.
Q 05What was the archaic English word for the walrus, still used in French?
Morse
Morse. It is the older English word: 'walrus' only arrived from Dutch in the 1650s, and morse still has cousins in French morse and Finnish mursu.
Q 06Which pinnipeds are the only ones that can grow larger than the walrus?
Elephant seals
Elephant seals. Their bulls can reach four tonnes, about twice a big walrus bull, but neither species lives in the Arctic, so on its home ice the walrus has no rival for size among its kin.
Q 07The walrus belongs to which order of mammals?
Carnivora
Carnivora. Some schemes give walruses and their flippered kin an order of their own, Pinnipedia, but they are generally classed as carnivores, closer to weasels and bears than to the whales they share the sea with.
Q 08How long can a walrus tusk grow?
1 metre
1 metre. Length settles most arguments: when two bulls square up they turn their heads to show their tusks side-on, and the one with the shorter pair usually backs away.
Q 09What do abrasion patterns show walruses actually use to dig prey from the seabed?
The upper edge of the snout
The upper edge of the snout. The tusks only trail through the mud as the walrus roots along the bottom, and it can also blast buried prey loose with jets of water squirted from its mouth.
Q 10What does a walrus mainly rely on to find food on the murky seabed?
Its whiskers
Its whiskers. Eyes are little use in the gloom, so a walrus feels its way along the bottom with 400 to 700 stiff, nerve-rich bristles that tell it the size and shape of whatever they touch.
Q 11A bull walrus's hide is thickest where it shields him from what?
Other walruses
Other walruses. Breeding bulls stab at each other with their tusks in fights that leave many scarred and some dead, so the hide where the blows land grows thicker than anywhere else on the body.
Q 12Why can a swimming walrus appear almost white?
Its skin blood vessels constrict in cold water
Its skin blood vessels constrict in cold water. Pulling warm blood away from the surface cuts the heat it loses to the sea, and it drains the skin of so much colour that the animal can look ghostly pale.
Q 13What lets a walrus sleep while floating upright?
Q 21Besides fighting and display, what do walruses use their tusks for in thick winter ice?
Keeping breathing holes open
Keeping breathing holes open. A walrus under the ice hammers upward with its tusks to break through, then works at the opening to stop it freezing over, so it can come up for air again.
Q 22How does a walrus get the meat out of a clam?
Sucks it from the shell
Sucks it from the shell. It clamps its lips on the clam and snaps its tongue back like a piston, and the vacuum pulls out the soft parts so cleanly that the empty shell just drops to the seabed.
Q 23Which director made Tusk, a 2014 horror film about a man surgically turned into a walrus?
An air sac under its throat
An air sac under its throat. Pumped full of air it works like a life jacket, holding the walrus's head at the surface so it can doze bolt upright without sinking.
Q 14Polished and sold as a souvenir in Alaska, the walrus's half-metre penis bone goes by what name?
Oosik
Oosik. The name comes straight from the Inupiaq word for the organ, and fossil ones are prized: polished up, they become knife handles and souvenirs sold to tourists across Alaska.
Q 15What are the 'bosses' that male walruses develop?
Nodules on the neck and shoulders
Nodules on the neck and shoulders. Females never grow them and males only from puberty, which is why researchers read the lumps as a sign of sex and maturity.
Q 16Which animal's pregnancy lasts even longer than the walrus's roughly 15 months?
Elephant
Elephant. An African elephant carries her calf for about 22 months; the walrus gets to 15 partly because its embryo floats undeveloped for the first few months, which times the birth for spring.
Q 17At most, how often can a female walrus give birth?
Every two years
Every two years. A pregnancy runs to 15 months and the calf then nurses for a year or more, so many mothers manage a calf only every third year, the slowest breeding rate of any pinniped.
Q 18Where does a walrus mother usually nurse her calf?
Out at sea
Out at sea. A calf nurses for about two years and simply tags along on its mother's feeding trips, drinking on demand whenever it is hungry.
Q 19In Inuit tradition, the sea's mammals, walruses among them in some tellings, sprang from the severed fingers of which goddess?
Sedna
Sedna. Thrown from a boat, she clung to its side until her fingers were cut away, then sank to the seabed to rule the animals they became, and a distant world beyond Neptune now bears her name.
Q 20Through which narrow strait do Pacific walrus herds swim north each spring, following the retreating ice?
The Bering Strait
The Bering Strait. Mothers and calves drift north through it with the melting ice, from the Bering Sea into the Chukchi Sea, while many bulls skip the trip and spend the summer on beaches further south.
Kevin Smith
Kevin Smith. He spun the plot out of a prank advert discussed on his podcast, in which a homeowner offered a free room to any lodger willing to dress up as a walrus.
Q 24Walruses do nearly all their feeding over which part of the ocean floor?
The continental shelf
The continental shelf. The clams a walrus lives on grow in shallow water, so it usually feeds just 10 to 50 metres down and seldom below 80, a paddle next to the dives of its deep-diving relatives.
Q 25Apart from humans, the walrus's main natural predators are the polar bear and which other animal?
Orca
Orca. Neither hunter relies on walrus, and both mostly pick off calves, because a full-grown adult's bulk and tusks make it a dangerous thing to attack.
Q 26How do polar bears typically hunt walruses?
Stampeding herds, then taking the injured
Stampeding herds, then taking the injured. Healthy adults are too big and well armed to tackle head-on, so a bear rushes a crowded beach and searches afterwards for young left crushed or stranded in the panic.
Q 27Mostly clam-eaters, some large bull walruses also kill and eat which other mammals?
Seals
Seals. The hunters are mostly big older males taking anything up to a 200 kg bearded seal, and they don't stop there: walruses have also been watched hunting seabirds.
Q 28The Walrus, a magazine of politics and culture, was launched in 2003 in which country?
Canada
Canada. Its Toronto founders wanted a home-grown answer to American magazines such as Harper's and The Atlantic, and it took 'Canada's Conversation' as its slogan.
Q 29Norway banned walrus hunting in 1952 when almost none were left around which of its Arctic islands?
Svalbard
Svalbard. Centuries of ivory hunting had left only a remnant, but under protection the herds have climbed back, to about 5,500 animals at the 2018 count.
Q 30Walruses once bred on which isolated sandbar 160 km southeast of Nova Scotia?
Sable Island
Colonies of 7,000-8,000 lived in the Gulf of St Lawrence into the 18th century before commercial harvest destroyed them.