A thread of fun shark facts I have inside my head (but I will quickly google to make sure they are correct before posting them) because that one person made me so annoyed:

Death by shark attacks (unprovoked) are super rare! The average is 6 and only 4 people died in 2019. The rate has gone down for the kind of sad reason that sharks are dwindling in population size.

Once when I was 8 I had a meltdown over the fact that some sharks can never stop swimming or they will die, but this is not the case for all sharks! However, the concept still stresses me out and I simply cannot think about it for too long.

My favourite shark is the sevengill shark. Most sharks have five gills (these are the slits that allow most fish to “breathe” underwater) but sevengills are super extra and have seven. Also their name is very literal which I appreciate.

You probably think that The Great White Shark is the biggest shark but you are wrong. It is the Whale Shark. They eat small fish and do not give a fuck about humans, tbh. Unbothered.

There are sharks in the arctic called Greenland Sharks that we have calcium dated as being at *least 272 years old, and probably will live into their 500s.

On the absolute flip side of these, hammerhead sharks were recently discovered in an active volcano

I have more! Sharks take test nibbles of things to see if they are fish or friend! A lot of non fatal shark attacks are curious sharks trying to figure out wtf humans are, then going “ew yuck” and spitting them out (not as someone implied recently a shark evolving to eat humans)

You also might have heard to punch a shark in the nose if it ever attacks and if you can’t get anything else that may work, but a better option would be eyes or gills, since you’re at risk for getting bit more OR making a shark who was just kind of curious think you’re now at war

Sharks have very good eyesight! You’ve probably heard about them being able to smell blood in the water but a diver friend of my dad’s got bit (non-seriously) because he had a red piece of fabric attached to his gear.

A NASA engineer conducted a test where he found that sharks are way more attracted to fish blood than mammal blood (almost like they have NOT evolved to consider humans part of their food chain) and given a choice will go for the fish blood.

Oh and the one that blows my mind is that hammerhead sharks have a 360 range of vision. The San Francisco tech museum had glasses you could wear that made you able to see like hammerheads once and it gave me a massive migraine.