Orcas are bringing back wearing salmon hats, but it’s not for fashion

Stop trying to make dead salmon hats happen. It’s probably not a thing.

People have been buzzing for weeks because scientists and a whale watcher this fall on separate occasions spotted two killer whales with dead salmon atop their heads while swimming in Puget Sound in Washington state.

That sparked several proclamations that so-called dead salmon hats were back “in vogue,” a retro revival of a trend from the 1980s when seemingly fashionista orcas from the same community exhibited the behavior. But scientists don’t believe killer whales are sporting dead salmon in the same way people rock a Stetson, baseball cap or a beret. While they don’t have enough data to determine the reason orcas are doing it, their prevailing theories are more prosaic than showing off on the runway: saving food for later or to share it with another orca.

The first sighting happened on Oct. 25 at Point No Point, Washington, where photographer Jim Pasola captured a shot of J27 Blackberry with a salmon on his head. Blackberry, a 33-year-old male orca, is a member of 72 Southern Resident killer whales, a long-suffering, ever-dwindling population perhaps most famous for the plight of J35 Tahlequah, a female orca who in 2018 mourned her dead calf by carrying its body for at least 17 days.

Two weeks after Pasola’s sighting, Deborah Giles, science and research director at the nonprofit Wild Orca, was aboard the organization’s research vessel Cheena in water just off the northern Seattle metro area when she looked over her right shoulder and saw an orca balancing a salmon on her head - long enough to notice but not long enough for Giles to identify the whale or for her field assistant to wheel around and get a photograph.

Still, it was the second time in as many months that the behavior had been documented, something that hadn’t happened since 1987. That summer, a female killer whale started wearing a dead salmon on her head, kick-starting the so-called “salmon hat” trend, according to the conservation nonprofit ORCA. Within weeks, killer whales in her pod and two others were doing the same.

The trend was exciting because it showed how nonessential behaviors could be learned - that orcas could create a culture. Giles cited hundreds of incidents over the past five years in which a small group of killer whales have rammed more than 650 vessels off Europe’s Iberian Peninsula.

“They’re good at social learning,” Giles said. “We know that you can see these things kind of explode.”

But they can also just as quickly die out, which is what happened to the salmon-hat craze of 1987. While observers caught the occasional salmon-on-head moment over the ensuing decades, they were few and far between, never reaching the heights of the late 80s.

In 2018, a drone operated by the Center for Whale Research captured one of the southern resident orcas with a salmon on its head, center research director Michael Weiss said. They documented several more in the ensuing years, but they were always one-offs.

Then came October and November and multiple sightings within weeks of each other, Giles said.

“That’s why people are getting excited about it again is because it wasn’t a one-off,” she said.

Giles said she’s trying to use the moment to highlight the plight of the southern residents, which were endangered in 2005 under the Endangered Species Act when the group had 83 members. In the nearly two decades since, those numbers have only continued to decline - to 72 - as they’re plagued by three main threats: lack of prey, contaminants such as DDT and PCBs in their food, as well as vessel noise and disturbance as they communicate using echolocation and hunt for food, according to Giles.

Giles said her recent research shows that, although female killer whales are getting pregnant and giving birth at relatively high rates, fewer than a third of those calves survive, which Giles attributes to the ever-present threats plaguing the southern residents, particularly that they are normally in “chronic stages of being hungry.”

“There’s a huge amount of calf mortality in the first year,” she said, adding: “These females are not getting enough to eat overall long term. And so their pregnancies are failing.”

Putting salmon on their heads could be tied to a temporary reprieve of hunger. Just like in 1987, the southern resident orcas are enjoying an abundance of chum salmon in the winter. With their bellies full and still more salmon at the ready, whales could be storing them to eat later or saving them for a particular killer whale they might see later.

But, Giles added, scientists don’t know. Wearing a salmon might feel good against an orca’s skin. They might be playing.

“It’s a mystery,” she said.

But they are probably not wearing it as a hat insofar as they are showing off their fashion sense or expressing their individuality, she added. That interpretation probably reveals more about the humans doing interpreting than the behavior itself.

“That’s a human construct,” she said.

Weiss agreed and expanded on Giles’s opinion.

“People like stories about animals, and especially whales and other like charismatic animals that we can see ourselves in,” he said, adding: “How we talk about them and think about them and the things we find interesting about them are so much about the mirror effect, about us seeing something about ourselves in them.”