Orcas start wearing dead salmon hats again after ditching the trend for 37 years
Orcas off the coast of Washington State are balancing dead fish on their heads like it's the 1980s, but researchers still aren't sure why they do it.
Northwest Pacific orcas have started wearing salmon hats again, bringing back a bizarre trend first described in the 1980s, researchers say.
Last month, scientists and whale watchers spotted orcas (Orcinus orca) in South Puget Sound and off Point No Point in Washington State swimming with dead fish on their heads.
This is the first time they've donned the bizarre headgear since the summer of 1987, when a trendsetting female West Coast orca kickstarted the behavior for no apparent reason. Within a couple of weeks, the rest of the pod had jumped on the bandwagon and turned salmon corpses into must-have fashion accessories, according to the marine conservation charity ORCA — but it's unclear whether the same will happen this time around.
Researchers think the orcas sporting salmon hats now may be veterans of the trend when it first appeared nearly 40 years ago. "It does seem possible that some individuals that experienced [the behavior] the first time around may have started it again," Andrew Foote, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Oslo in Norway, told New Scientist.
