They may look like big dumb lumps, but it turns out that walruses are actually musical prodigies. In fact, during mating rituals, walrus bulls seduce females with compositions that rival the songs of nightingales and humpback whales for their complexity.

To compose their songs, these sedan-sized maestros rely on more than just their voices. Walruses play their hulking bodies — the bulls can reach 4,500 lbs, almost twice the weight of a Honda Civic — like a one-man-band. Here’s a lovely passage by Natalie Angier of the New York Times describing the weird music of the walrus:

Walruses sing with their fleshy and muscular lips, tongues, muzzles and noses. They sing by striking their flippers against their chests to hit their pharyngeal pouches, balloon-like extensions of the trachea that are unique to Odobenus [walrus] and that also serve as flotation devices.

In full breeding tilt, the bulls sound like a circus, a construction site, a Road Runner cartoon. They whistle, beep, rasp, strum, bark and knock. They make bell tones, jackhammer drills, train-track clatters and the rubber-band boing! of Wile E. Coyote getting bonked on the head. They mix and match their boings, bells and knocks, they speed up and slow down, they vocalize underwater, in the air, at the bubbly border between. They sing nonstop for days at a time, and their songs can be heard up to 10 miles away. They listen to one another, take tips from one another and change their tune as time and taste require.

Although experts haven’t deciphered the lyrics of the songs, they know that females tend to reject tone-deaf mates. And now scientists are working with walruses to push the limits of their musical creativity. In one experiment, researchers withheld or dispensed food rewards as their blubbery subjects found new ways to make music. One walrus discovered he could blow air through a rubber pool toy to make it honk like a bugle. Shortly after, two of his fellows learned the same technique.

To learn more about Walruses, visit NATURE’s Toothwalkers: Giants of the Arcitic Ice. There you can:

• Dive behind the scenes with filmmaker Adam Ravetch as he talks about his harrowing experience filming walruses underwater.
• Learn more about the walrus’ threatened Arctic environment.
• Discover how orphaned walruses fare in captivity.

For more about the Arctic environment, mating rituals, and melodious mammals, visit NATURE online.