chunks of flommus
SUBSCRIBE! FEEDLY RSS EMAIL

sharksweek!

For all of you who did not ask, here are my top five favorite sharks and why I love them:

I love this slow as fuck shark, it’s the sloth of sharks – well, until it strikes, then its like a badass ninja – just slow creeping and then POW, you’re food before you know it.

Not only do these sharks live for, like, 500 years, they’re also probably the animal flexing as the Loch Ness Monster which is a pretty solid prank.

2. cookiecutter shark

I love this shark because it is such a little jerk.

He’s tiny but he has this crazy jaw that will cut perfectly round holes like a cookie cutter into the flesh of other animals. He zooms in out of nowhere and chomps a perfect circle and dips. It’s so rude hahaha.

He’ll even snack on badasses like Great Whites and Orcas. No fear.

So if you ever seen a weirdly perfect circular hole on an ocean animal, you know who did it.

3. frilled shark

Google this shark, we don’t see them that often because it lives way deep in the ocean, but it’s fun to look at because it’s kind of a terrifying creature hahaha.

I love this shark because this is what prehistoric sharks all looked like – eel-like, too many gills, fins all on the tail – just kicking it unchanged for millions of years to only come to the shallows every few decades to give us nightmares.

4. nurse shark

I have a special place in my heart for these sharks because they are essentially the couch potatoes of the sea.

We mostly see them spending their time just chilling in cuddle piles but they are far from lazy, they’re just nocturnal. They are amazing hunters with basically this crazy mouth vacuum that sucks up prey at record-setting force.

These are the sharks that are easiest to swim with, they’re pretty docile to humans 🙂.

5. shortfin mako shark

You know this shark can swim at 45 MPH?

Not only that, they’re total showoffs, they’ll straight up race boats. They’re also acrobats and can jump 20 FEET out of the water. Imagine a 300 pound shark just blasted out of the water the height of a two story house. Fucking amazing.

They jump over and onto boats all the time and they’re related to Great Whites so they have a pretty strong “what are you gonna do about it” vibe when they do, lol.

They also eat *swordfish,* they’re just hardcore AF.

honorable mention whale shark

Who would not love these gentle, playful sharks? My heart.

favorite individual shark emma the lemon shark

Google her, she’s a sweetie.

Humans kill about 100 million sharks every year.

A lot of this is the result of commercial fishing, but it is also because people fear sharks so much they engage in things like shark culling.

Yet sharks are super diverse, not all sharks even eat meat (there’s a hammerhead that eats seaweed). Even those that are apex predators are vital to the health of the ocean’s ecology.

So I really just wanted to share some of my favorites because I’m sick of the damage of things like Shark Week that needlessly stoke fear of these awesome animals.

also very important

There’s only 60–80 unprovoked shark attacks against humans globally every year and on average about five people die a year as the result of all shark attacks (including provoked).

To put this in context: 100 people in the United States alone die every year from choking on pen caps.

So sharks are not the threat we’ve made them out to be at all.

I love them.

—natalie michelle