Fishing for the elusive meaning behind trends
If all your friends were wearing salmon on their noses, would you do it too?
Somewhere in the vicinity of the late 1980s, a trend for natty woollen leg warmers, preferably in neon, was dying out. Elsewhere in the world, a trend for sporting a dead salmon on your head was taking hold. Just as inexplicable fads with questionable effects on your physiology and/or life permeate the human population — similarly, surprising interests in obscure activities or sartorial aberrations take hold of other creatures with which we share the planet.
Their parallel lives are just as dense with cultural nuance and the detritus of the ages. They too have a “remember when we used to” approach to the passage of time.
In 1987, a female orca in the Pacific Northwest’s Puget Sound draped a dead salmon fetchingly over her nose — just so. The poissons à la nez fad fanned out to the rest of her pod, and in six weeks all the southern residents of the Puget Sound — many, many pods of orcas were deep into the “dead salmon” look.
The fad didn’t just catch on within the trendsetter’s pod (her maternal family group). It took hold of all orcas, everywhere. And then, as suddenly as it had started, it was over. Nobody knows why it came about nor why it came to an end, and it has never been observed again.
It could have been just for fun — an activity of uncertain benefit practised briefly but intensely just for the sake of it.
Which is the current theory circulating about why the orcas were ramming and toppling fishing boats and messing with propellers in Spain and France last year. Most behaviours can be traced back to some reason, stratagem or biological advantage leading to evolutionary success or long-term survival of your species.
But others are just for the sheer hell of it the pleasure of, say, floating in the propeller’s wake — so you nudge the still propeller to get it going and then discover even more fun knocking over boats. “Look at this, guys — I can topple this thing and those tiny bipedals on the thing shout and make a noise and encourage me to do it again. I love it!”
And so it goes. Suddenly all the pod’s juveniles are doing it — like teenage hooligans — and before you know it, it’s spread like a viral trend to all the other pods. And then — ugh it’s so last season. I don’t think anyone is toppling fishing boats this year. The scientists haven’t recorded a single incident. And as for salmon draped over the nose? Who even does that?
Has anyone done the Ice Bucket Challenge lately? What was it even for? Now everyone is ice plunging. Just last night I watched a chap review a Chianti wine in clipped tones brought on by hypothermia. He called the review the Wine Hoff method (it can be observed in pods across the world).
In this instance, you set up your tiny plastic pod in the backyard and immerse yourself in ice for periodic bouts of insanity. It’s really fun. You release endorphins and get rid of the inflammation that the Chianti you’re reviewing — and, of course, imbibing — has brought on.
But, in the greater scheme of things, this behaviour catches on because it’s fun, not because it has some evolutionary advantage whatsoever. Yes, even the ice plunge. You get a frisson of joy and madness and delight — for a moment you are in the moment, alive and charged with energy.
Is there any evolutionary advantage to TikTok dances? Is there any evolutionary advantage to plain old dancing? Sometimes we just do stuff because it’s fun to do it. Plus, we’re high from all the deep breathing. Just like wearing that fish on your nose back in the summer of ’89.