Back in fashion: Orcas in the wild wearing dead salmon hats
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A pod of killer whales have been seen donning dead fish as fashion accessories off the coast of Washington state.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: PEXELS
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After ramming yachts off the coast of Spain, orcas are on to yet another bizarre trend: wearing dead salmon hats.
Scientists and whale watchers have recently spotted killer whales off the coast of Washington state in the US swimming with dead fish on their heads, a mysterious behaviour first observed 37 years ago.
In the summer of 1987, a trend-setting female orca was seen in the US West Coast with a dead fish on her head.
Weeks later, the rest of her pod were turning salmon corpses into must-have fashion accessories.
Researchers think the orcas sporting salmon hats now may be the same ones that were in on the trend years ago.
“It does seem possible that some individuals that experienced (the behaviour) the first time around may have started it again,” Dr Andrew Foote, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Oslo in Norway, told the New Scientist magazine.
But no one still has a firm answer as to why.
“Honestly, your guess is as good as mine,” Dr Deborah Giles, an orca researcher at the University of Washington who also heads the science and research teams at the non-profit Wild Orca, told New Scientist.
The dead salmon hat trend in the 1980s eventually disappeared as quickly as it began.
By the summer of 1988, dead fish were totally passe, and salmon hats disappeared from the West Coast orca population.
One odd behaviour among orcas that have persisted, though, is their penchant for ramming boats off the Iberian peninsula.
Since 2020, a pod of killer whales has had at least 670 run-ins with medium-length boats sailing off the coast of Morocco.
The whales have mostly been targeting the boats’ spade rudders, disabling them.
But they have managed to sink some boats. Two people had to be rescued by an oil tanker after their yacht sank in the Strait of Gibraltar in March 2024.
A report submitted by scientists and policymakers to the International Whaling Commission in February dispelled talk of an “orca uprising”.
“The behaviour has more in common with fads seen elsewhere and seems associated with play or socialising
It said an abundance of prey seems to have given the killer whales more time to goof around.
