Orca whales have been spotted wearing dead salmon as hats, simultaneously charming and confounding scientists around the world.
On October 25, an Orca whale from a group of whales called the J pod was spotted with a dead salmon perched on top of its head as it swam through Puget Sound in Washington State, USA.
A quick-thinking onlooker snapped a pic and sent it to the Orca Network, a non-profit organisation that tracks whales in the Pacific Northwest. While it’s a funny little occurrence to spot, for scientists, it was exciting.
You see, this is the first time in 37 years that this behaviour has been spotted in orca pods.
Back in 1987, a female orca whale from the K pod was spotted parading around with a dead salmon on her head. Girly was a trendsetter and before long, others from her pod were seen sporting the same look. By the next summer, the salmon hat was nowhere to be seen.
As if it was a pair of mesh ballet flats, the salmon hat trend had seemingly gone out of fashion. However, as trends are typically cyclical, the return of the salmon hat could mean a fashionable resurgence within whale communities.
Whales, they’re just like us. Salmon hats? Bubble skirts? The only difference is we don’t have fins. Basically.
Andrew Foote, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Oslo, believes that the whales exhibiting the salmon hat trend this time around are likely to be veterans of the 80s fashion movement.
“It does seem possible that some individuals that experienced [the behaviour] the first time around may have started it again,” he said, via New Scientist.
Currently, scientists don’t know what the motivation behind the fashion trend is. However, there are a few theories, with the leading hypothesis being that the salmon represents the abundant amount of fish in the sea this time of year.
“Maybe it was celebrating that there are just so many fish [around that] we can play with them,” Howard Garrett, a sociologist and the co-founder of the Orca Network who has been observing orcas since the ’80s told CBC News.
However, Garrett reckons that it’s more likely a form of communication.
“Orcas are the most socially bonded mammals known to science, they stay in their families and their extended families for life,” he said.
“They’re completely social, so this is some sort of social communication. And what it indicates is that they are using the fish as some kind of symbol. A symbol of what, I don’t know.”
In the past, people have spotted Orcas playing with their food in other ways, too.
“We’ve seen mammal-eating killer whales carry large chunks of food under their pectoral fin, kind of tucked in next to their body,” University of Washington’s orca researcher Deborah Giles told Live Science.
According to ORCA, a UK marine conservation charity, killer whales aren’t the only underwater giants who engage in hat-wearing behaviour. Mysticises or baleen whales — which are the ones with comb-like teeth that allow them to filter feed on krill or plankton— have been documented wearing seaweed as a frilly little hat.
This was first spotted in 2007 and is now referred to as “kelping”.
“The seaweed hat is so popular that humpbacks from the northern and southern hemispheres, who have never even crossed paths, have been observed kelping,” a conservationist named Holly wrote for ORCA. In this case, researchers believe they do it simply because it’s a vibe and it feels good. Iconic behaviour from the baleen whales, if you ask me.
For researchers, the next steps are to attempt to monitor the salmon-wearing whales to see what they actually do with the fish.
“Over time, we may be able to gather enough information to show that, for instance, one carried a fish for 30 minutes or so, and then he ate it,” Giles said.
However, if they abandon the fish altogether, experts might have to do some more thinking.
Either way, I love these giant divas. Fingers crossed that the salmon hat really does take off again and we can see a bunch more whales looking groovy like their elders did in the ’80s.
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