Solution: The Social Ladder through the Ages

Answer: EARLY CAMBRIAN

Written by Jonah Ostroff

Each puzzle in the Sociology department uses parts of the profiles of two fish. This puzzle uses the selfies from Hammerhead’s Instaclam page, and the post from Octopus’s Chumblr page that’s been reblogged many times.

The usernames of the reblogged posts on Octopus’s page form clues to a word ladder, in order:

Meanwhile, the 13 Hammerhead selfies all have a caption of the format: “Imagine how good your life would be if you had a [age]-year old [clue] by your side. now replace [letter] with [letter]” The ages exactly correspond to the years that someone would turn in 2023 if they were born in the years from the 13 usernames reblogged by Octopus. We can use this to order the clues, then answer them and make the replacements:

The resulting instruction tells how to use these two lists of clues: find where the letters in the answers match, and then read the corresponding digits in the years. These are always numbers between 1 and 26, which can be converted into letters:

This spells the answer, EARLY CAMBRIAN.