How it works
Ten questions can't tell 60 animals apart on their own. The trick is to put you and every animal in the same space.
Six traits, taken from zoology
Each animal gets a score from 0 to 10 on six traits. The scores come from how the species actually lives: how big its groups are, how it reacts to a threat, how fast it burns energy, how much it explores, how long it stays with a mate or a young one, how far it travels. Then a hand-edit for the well-known animals so the reading feels right.
- Sociability
- solitary ↔ lives in a crowd. In zoology: group size, from the leopard to the honeybee colony.
- Boldness
- cautious ↔ confronts things. In zoology: the shy–bold axis that behavioural ecologists measure in almost every species.
- Energy
- slow, saves effort ↔ always moving. In zoology: activity level and metabolic rate, from the sloth to the hummingbird.
- Curiosity
- likes routine ↔ has to know. In zoology: exploration, play and problem-solving, from the tortoise to the octopus.
- Devotion
- loose ties ↔ bonds for life. In zoology: pair bonds and parental investment, from the mantis to the albatross.
- Roaming
- stays put ↔ crosses oceans. In zoology: home range and migration, from the snail to the salmon.
Your answers land in the same space
Every answer adds or removes points on one to three of those traits. At the end your totals are compared with the average quiz-taker on each trait, so the result is about where you stand out, not about how many points you collected.
Then the quiz measures the angle between your profile and each of the 60 animal profiles (cosine similarity, for the curious) and picks the closest. The two runners-up are shown too, because "why am I this one" is half the fun.
Fifteen well-known animals get a small bonus (5%) in close races. Without it, too many people would get the pufferfish, and "I'm a Pufferfish" is a worse conversation than "I'm a Wolf". Only slightly.
The rarity number is real
"Only 0.4% of people are Axolotls" is counted from actual quiz completions and refreshed daily. Until enough people have taken the quiz the page says so and shows an estimate from a simulation of every possible answer combination.
The five rarest results get a gold frame on their card. Because that's a ranking rather than a fixed threshold, gold stays rare however the numbers shift.
About "spirit animal"
People search for the phrase, so the page uses it. Nothing here borrows from anyone's tradition: the reading under "as a spirit animal" is what the animal's real behaviour says about a person who answered the way you did, written by someone who reads too many field guides. It's a personality quiz, not a belief system.
About the pictures and the characters
Every animal is shown with a 19th-century engraving from natural-history books that are now in the public domain, mostly Brehms Tierleben and The Royal Natural History. Each one is credited on the credits page.
Each animal also lists three characters of its kind from literature. They all come from public-domain works, cited with book, author and year. They're company, not a verdict: being a Wolf doesn't make you Akela.
What we keep
Nothing on a server of our own. Your result lives in your browser; the link you share names only the animal. Details are on the privacy page.