PACIFIC NORTHWEST/SALISH SEA
Speculation abounds regarding a photo taken by Jim Pasola on Oct. 25, 2024, which shows an orca known as J27, or Blackberry, wearing a dead salmon on his head, rather stylishly. Deborah Giles, a longtime biologist at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories, noted that a similar “salmon hat craze” spread to the three pods that comprise the southern resident orcas of Washington’s Salish Sea. “It seemed to kind of pass along to multiple different members of the population,” Giles told National Geographic, and then, like so many fashions, it faded away, until J27 resurrected it. One explanation for the jaunty headgear, aside from the orca’s natural desire to make the next best-dressed water-mammal list, involves the Salish Sea’s unusually high chum salmon population. When food is abundant, the orcas have the luxury to goof off and attract mates, perform interpretive dances or launch a modeling career, whatever the case may be. “These are incredibly smart animals,” Giles said. “The paralimbic portion of their brain is significantly more developed than it is even in humans, and these are parts of their brains that are associated with memory, and emotion, and language.” Which makes sense; after all, orcas aren’t the only mammals to wear animal remnants on their heads. We humans have long accessorized using other species’ skins, furs and feathers, though most of us clearly lack the orcas’ fabulous sense of style.
OREGON
Totally tubular “sea pickles” are making a splash on Oregon’s beaches. These particular “pickles” don’t belong on charcuterie boards, however — well, not human ones, though dolphins, bony fish and whales certainly relish them. These kooky, plankton-swilling critters are often mistaken for jellyfish owing to their gelatinous and translucent appearance, but they’re actually made up of multi-celled animal colonies called zooids. Oregon’s most commonly found species is Pyrosoma atlanticum, which can grow up to 2 feet long, the Seaside Aquarium told The Oregonian. Pyrosomes have a bioluminescent glow — Pyrosoma translates to “fire body” — and they tend to congregate near the equator though they’ve been known to show up en masse on Oregon and Washington beaches and as far north as Alaska. Despite their undeniably weird appearance, they’re reportedly harmless to humans and dogs, though it might be best to avoid getting pickled on them.
ARIZONA
Will educators one day be replaced by artificial intelligence? Apparently, it’s already happening: The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools green-lit an application for an AI-based virtual school — “Unbound Academy” — while Texas and Florida have already launched Alpha Schools, which use an AI teaching model. Unbound Academy claims that students can learn twice as much with AI as they do using traditional teaching methods, kjzz.com reported. Dean of Parents Tim Eyerman said the school day will start with AI learning on language, science and math, then switch to non-academic subjects: “The morning is taken over through our AI learning, and in the afternoon they get the opportunity to really hone in on those life skills,” he said. Those “life skills” include developing teamwork strategies through practicing the “Harvard Business Study of climbing Mount Everest,” whatever that is, and “narrating scenarios” from Dungeons & Dragons. The next step, obviously, is to replace human students with, say, cellphones, something that’s also already happening.
CALIFORNIA
This next story really should carry a Content Warning. Discoverwildlife.com published this shocking headline: “Bloodthirsty squirrels develop a taste for meat.” A long-term behavioral study from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and the University of California indicated that California ground squirrels — slightly larger relatives of those adorable li’l critters your dog loves to chase around the park — are actually vicious serial killers that hunt, kill and devour other adorable li’l critters, particularly the mouse-like (not mousse-like) rodents called voles. Researchers, who were studying how the ground squirrels adapt to environmental changes, believe that they expanded their formerly vegan plant-and-seed diet to include dejeuner avec des souris, owing to the unusually high numbers of voles in California’s Briones Regional Park. Jennifer Smith, associate professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, told CNN in an email: “In the face of human insults such as climate change and drought, these animals are resilient and have the potential to adapt to live in a changing world.” We can’t wait to see how the rest of our fellow mammals adapt once they figure out that the planet’s climate change problems are entirely our fault, and that we’re edible, too.
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This article appeared in the February 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Heard Around the West.”
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