14 DAY TRIAL // The US Fish and Wildlife Service, along with Interior Secretary, Dirk Kempthorne, were sued by the Center for Biological Diversity, for failing to qualify one of their petitions as having merit or not. The legal time for the FWS to reply has passed, so the organization, which successfully petitioned for the adding of the polar bear to the Endangered Species Act, will now try to force the government's hand in coming to a decision about the walruses.
These animals are entirely dependent on the ice to live, feed and breed. In the winter, they drift around in the Arctic Ocean on icebergs, diving constantly for clams and other such foods. Shrinking ice means less room for the colonies, and scarcer food supplies, as more walruses occupy the same iceberg in the middle of the sea, with no other "inhabited chunks" of ice nearby.
In 2008, the level of the ice sheet surrounding the North Pole was extremely low, second only to that recorded in 2007, which marked the smallest ever-recorded Northern ice cap since surveillance of the Pole began – estimates say that the entire cap sized only about 1.74 million square miles, as opposed to the 1.65 million square miles recorded in 2007.
"Every day that goes by without protecting the walrus, we're emitting more greenhouse gases, accelerating the ice melt. In addition to the climate change, the other main threat is oil and gas development that continues to go forward without any consultation regarding walrus," argues Center for Biological Diversity attorney, Rebecca Noblin.
The environmental organization says that, if coherent measures are not employed in time, then the walrus populations will only survive in Alaska and Siberia, for limited periods of time. The ice will eventually melt there too, leaving the animals without their source of transportation, feeding and breeding. This fate can only be prevented if they are added to the Endangered Species Act, just like the polar bears.