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Audun Rikardsen's Image
Audun developed a firm friendship with this young male walrus, nicknamed Buddy, who spent several months hanging around the beach outside Tromsø.
Audun would often join it in the water to play. ‘I could tell whether it was having fun, teasing me, splashing water at my face and talking to me, or whether it was grumpy,’ he says. Despite their thick, bristly appearance, a walrus’s whiskers are incredibly sensitive. They use them to search for their main prey of clams on the sea floor. After clearing the soft substrate away with their flippers, they suck the clams out of their shells, sometimes consuming thousands in a single sitting.
Behind the lens
Audun Rikardsen
Norway
Growing up in a small fishing community in northern Norway, Audun developed a lifelong fascination with the Arctic’s landscape, culture and wildlife – both above and below the ocean’s surface. While he remains a part-time photographer, he’s a full-time professor in biology at the UiT Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. There he uses this combination to integrate photography into his scientific fieldwork and to inspire and share his scientific results with the public.
Image details
- Canon EOS 5D Mark III
- 8-15mm f4 lens at 15mm
- 1/160 sec at f10 • ISO 2500 • Canon 600 flash
- Tromsø, Norway
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