As I waited for a chance to swim a few laps this afternoon, I watched with interest the habits of the common domesticated H. sapiens offspring in their aquatic environment.
One boy, apparently blind because he kept his eyes wide shut and hands outstretched, kept yelling “Marco!”. The other small subjects responded at once, as if driven by millenia of powerful evolutionary forces: “Polo!”
I am not altogether certain what the survival advantage is from this behaviour, as near as I could tell it enabled the sightless boy to be able to more efficiently locate his prey. In the few minutes that I wated this odd behaviour, he never did catch anything. I assume he went hungry that evening.
The sighted subjects, trying their best to keep their distance from the preditor, would sometimes climb up onto dry land in order to evade capture. The blind hunter would sometimes shout out somthing in his native language that I was never quite able to understand. It sounded like “lamb dark” or maybe “hamhocks”, and if any potential prey happened to be out of the water at that time, this phrase seemed to force them to jump back into the water.
Such odd behaviour I have noted here. Survival of the fittest? A cruel taunting of the tribe’s sole sightless member?
Or maybe it was just a game.
What the heck were they doing??
They were playing the swimming pool version of Blind Man’s Bluff.
I went upstairs and ran this past my own pet homo sapiens, subspecies preteengirliensis, and she confirmed that this is indeed a pool game, although she drew a blank on the “lamb chop” thing. When they play “Marco Polo”, she informed me rather stiffly, they don’t have any problems with people cheating by getting out of the pool (all players must remain in the pool at all times).
And this is the Central Illinois version–no doubt there are other regional variations.
And my other pet homo sapiens, subspecies teenmusculosus, who just got home, says that when they play “Marco Polo”, they holler, “Fish outta water!” when someone cheats by getting out of the pool.
And the progenitor of both these remarkable specimens, upon reading the OP, exclaimed, “That’s what I thought, too, the first time I saw it at the pool–I thought they were teasing the blind kid.”
Marco Polo has always been a summertime standard in my part of KY, although not as popular as water tag. In fact, as a joke in math class one afternoon, my friends and I started saying “Marco!” (pause) “Polo!”. We ended up using Ponce de Leon’s name, because it’s funnier that way.
(As a bonus, here’s water tag. One person, It, has a small ball, for example a tennis ball or such. The remaining players line up at the diving board. As each one jumps off, It throws the ball at them. If you get hit with the ball before you get back in line, you become It. Catching the ball mid-jump keeps you from being It, and you can throw the ball anywhere to protect the others. It’s fun.)
-Brianjedi
Although now a mature adult male, this was a regular behaviour manifested by myself and other juveniles of the species in my habitat. I can confirm the behaviours reported by Duck Duck Goose. Getting out of the pool was not regarded as cheating as such, but merely risked the evolutionary disadvantage that you would be “caught” when “fish out of water” was called. If more than one person was out of the pool when “fish out of water” was called, the last juvenile to dive back in the water was “in”.
And Attrayant, although responding “Polo” to the call "Marco might have seemed an evolutionary disadvantage (in that it enabled the seeker to utilise aural location), failing to do so conferred a more certain disadvantage, namely being dobbed in by other juveniles and suffering the penalty, namely becoming “in” immediately.
My friends and I would play this game very often, but we would replace “Marco! Polo!” with “Stop! Hammertime!”
We were young and drank too much Mountain Dew.