On a recent night in the University District of Missoula, Karlissa Skinner, 31, was scrolling through Tinder. Swiping left and right, she meandered through the app hoping to find a man who sparked her interest.
But rather than locking eyes with a future soulmate, she was met with the unblinking gaze of trout, bass, and other fish.
“I just couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. “There are only so many fish pics a girl can take.”
In Missoula, a city celebrated for its rivers and outdoor culture, dating apps are overflowing with men posing proudly with their catches. But for many women swiping through these profiles, the endless fish pics have become less of a flex and more of a red flag. The proud fishing snapshot has turned into a running joke, and in some cases, a dealbreaker.
“There are only so many fish pics a girl can take.”
Elizabeth Mullowney, 40, moved to Missoula two years ago after living in Chicago. She said that while there are men posing with fish in their profiles in Chicago, the number of fish pics in Missoula is “on acid,” and their ubiquity has her frustrated. “Dying animals and romance don’t really mix,” she said. (Yes, she knows that most of these hooked fish are, in fact, released alive, but still.)
The fish pic, often called the “grip and grin,” has long been a fixture of men’s online dating profiles. But the impulse to display one’s catch is ancient.
Before photography, our ancestors drew animals in caves and hunted, gathered and scavenged to stay alive. Images of fish carved into rock date back to the Paleolithic times.
Once cameras became more available in the early 1900s, fish pics became common among outdoor enthusiasts, including proto-outdoorsmen Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemmingway. In 1992, the once niche fishing world was brought into the mainstream with the release of the movie A River Runs Through It, starring Brad Pitt and set on the Blackfoot River.
The movie helped spark the fly fishing boom of the 1990s. The American Fly Fishing Trade Association estimated that, between 1995 and 2001, the number of people who fly-fished at least once a year jumped from 7.7 million to 13.3 million, as reported by the Chicago Tribune in 2002. (Locally, as the story noted, annual fishing days on the Blackfoot River nearly tripled over a decade.) Suddenly, new anglers inspired by the film’s romantic portrayal of the sport were spurred to take up their rods, head to the river and snap some pics.
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Dr. Liesel Sharabi, associate professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication and director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at Arizona State University, has been studying the ways that dating apps influence communication and connection for over a decade.
“Fish pics are a phenomenon that has been a persistent trend on dating apps over the years,” she said. Perhaps evolutionary psychology — signaling the ability to provide for a mate — explains it. Though, “To me, that feels like a little bit of a stretch.”
More likely, Sharabi suggests, it’s about social conventions — men are simply copying each other because they think the fish pics look appealing and might help them to lure in a mate.
Missoula is a world-renowned fly-fishing destination offering access to famous rivers including the Clark Fork, Bitterroot, Blackfoot, and Rock Creek, as well as abundant smaller streams. The trout fisheries in the area are some of the best in the region, offering anglers opportunities to catch brown, rainbow, and native cutthroat trout.
In 2024, Montana sold more than 487,000 fishing licenses, including about 165,000 non-resident, one-day licenses.
Joey Calnan, a 29-year-old who’s lived in the area for more than 12 years and works for a construction company, is among the Missoula anglers who’ve posted fish pics to Tinder. He said his friends have teased him about it, but Calnan shrugs it off, saying the prevalence of fish pics should come as no surprise in a fly-fishing hub like Missoula. Plus, he says he has few photos of himself without fish.
“I personally would never ask somebody to take a photo of me unless it was coerced or I’m doing something interesting,” he said. “Having the fish be the subject of the picture feels like a reason to take a picture.”
“Having the fish be the subject of the picture feels like a reason to take a picture.”
The fish pic trend is difficult to quantify. But this reporter’s unscientific sampling of 100 random profiles of Missoula men casting around for women on the dating app Hinge found 43 featuring a fish pic.
Dating and relationship coach Emyli Lovz says good pictures are important for creating a successful dating profile. She explains that dating apps use collaborative filtering algorithms — meaning that the profiles of people who get more matches are shared with other people who get a similar number of matches.
“For that reason, if your photos are not good, you’re not going to get in front of the people that you’re really most interested in,” Lovz said.
Lovz encourages men to post pictures of their hobbies, including fishing, in their profiles, because she thinks it’s important to show your true self when looking for love.
But many Missoula women who date men disagree, and some are simply not taking the bait.
“I just don’t want to be looking at a [fish] when I’m looking for love,” said Skinner, who has recently taken a break from dating apps.
