Thought I'd share a Facebook post I made just the other day...

"From the pile of odds and ends that still rattle around in my head; "The Hundredth Monkey Effect"

I saw on the news tonight that a family of Orcas spent some time in and around a West Vancouver marina to the delight of onlookers. It's a relatively new behavior and was first reported In British Columbia in 2022. Since then, there have been several more "visitations", including one with a Kayaker in North Vancouver reported just 7 hours ago.

I know what you're thinking, "What does this have to do with monkeys?". Well, back in the 50s a team of Japanese monkey researchers conducted an experiment that supposedly led to a startling observation.
Here's the Wikipedia summary:

"The hundredth monkey effect is an esoteric idea claiming that a new behavior or idea is spread rapidly by unexplained means from one group to all related groups once a critical number of members of one group exhibit the new behavior or acknowledge the new idea. The behavior was said to propagate even to groups that are physically separated and have no apparent means of communicating with each other". (See where I'm going with this?)

In 2020 Orcas started attacking sailboats around Spain and Portugal. Just yesterday a woman was injured in such an attack off the coast of Spain. There have been a few theories as to what's causing the attacks but nothing definitive yet.

The Hundredth Monkey effect has been fictionalized and debunked. The idea that a "collective consciousness" could exist appealed to the youth of the late 60s and early 70s but lost traction in the information age. Even so, I'm going to keep my eyes out for more local encounters. You never know, maybe the critical number of European boat trashing Orcas just hasn't been reached yet...