Ocean · plate 49 of 60
Shark
Carcharodon carcharias
Never stops moving. Never explains why.
5.2% of people are Sharks. (estimated)
If you're a Shark
You travel alone, you travel far, and you don't explain either. You are decisive to the point of alarming people, and you have no interest in being liked, only in being effective. You keep moving; stopping is not really in your design. You are not angry. You are focused, which from the outside looks the same.
Great white sharks can keep their core and swimming muscles warmer than the surrounding sea, a trick almost no other fish manages.
The Shark as a spirit animal
You are independent, direct and frighteningly good at following through, which makes you excellent at the job and unsettling at the party. You cover distances, in work and in life, that other people only plan. The flaw is that you give almost nothing to anyone who is not currently useful, and you leave before the goodbyes. A shark has no swim bladder. It stays up by moving, or it sinks.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Shark
Do
- Give them a destination, not a meeting.
- Say it straight; subtext is for animals with time.
- Let them go; they come back on their own route, in their own year.
Don't
- Don't ask them to stay still for your comfort; a great white has to keep moving to breathe.
- Don't splash. Attention from this animal is not the kind you want.
When it goes wrong: A shark that has decided is already committed; don't thrash, hold your ground, and keep your eyes on it until it turns.
The Shark in a relationship
You are not looking, and then you are briefly, intensely interested, and then you are a thousand miles away. You do not do domestic. Your partners get your full attention for exactly as long as you are in the same water, and then they get the open sea. Devotion is not your sport.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 1
- Boldness
- 10
- Energy
- 6
- Curiosity
- 4
- Devotion
- 0
- Roaming
- 9
- A tagged great white swam from South Africa to Australia and back in under a year, a round trip of about 20,000 kilometers.
- Sharks sense the faint electric fields of other animals' muscles through pores in the snout.
- Teeth are replaced throughout life; one falls out and the next row moves forward.
Sharks in literature
- The shark of the pearl banks — Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne (1870)
- The Maldive Shark — The Maldive Shark, Herman Melville (1888)
- The sharks — The Story of Doctor Dolittle, Hugh Lofting (1920)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Shark's. If you got Shark, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other ocean
Among the 60
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
