Putting a Dead Fish on Tinder Might Get You Laid

With 50 million users worldwide and an estimated one billion swipes per day, it's not exactly easy to stand out in the ever-expanding sea of hopeful singles that is Tinder.

For men trying to play up their virility in the name of a hallowed right-swipe, no pose is too desperate or too extreme, and among the many visual patterns emerging in the age of digital courting is dudes holding really big fish.

This trend has become prominent enough for Fishbrain, a fishing app developer, to take a closer look at the modern incarnation of anglers bragging about the size of their catch. In a survey entitled "Love at First Bite?", Fishbrain collected responses from 1,000 members of the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority in order to see if these photos were at all useful in snagging a companion of the opposite sex.

With approximately 22 percent of Florida men using fish pics to woo on Tinder, there was no shortage of data to pool. Interestingly, the survey concluded that 46 percent of women found pictures of men holding fish to be "more attractive" than photos of those very same men sans fish.

Fishbrain even broke down their results by fish species, and the Great Northern Tilefish seems to be the real catch for the sorority sisters, a quarter of whom found men holding a tilefish more attractive. That puts the very phallic Sailfish in a distant second with only 20 percent of the female vote. Juvenile Common Carp, as their name would suggest, were at the bottom of the fish barrel with a very lonely 1 percent of the sorority's vote.

But underlying the nearly half of women who found pictures of men with fish more attractive is the fact that, by extension, 54 percent of ladies still preferred photos of men not holding fish.

In other words, posting pictures of fish may be just as futile and shrouded in mystery as other heterosexual mating rituals.