License to Gill

Fact: Great Whites could never get their license !

Great white sharks are ram ventilators which means that they need to keep moving forward in order for water to properly flow through their open mouth to oxygenate their gills. Sharks as well as other fish (like tuna!) that are ram ventilators like the great white have to continuously swim! That means no stopping for stop lights or sea lion pedestrians.

Also great white sharks use there homoocercal tails for locomotion by pushing water through lateral motions of their caudal fin, so there isn’t really a way to reverse this motion to swim backwards. So, no reversing or 3 point turns for these guys! But maybe great whites and other sharks like it are simply teaching us that sometimes it’s best to leave things behind and keeps pushing forward to a better tomorrow #deep like Mariana Trench deep…

Fish that can swim backwards will use there non-downward facing pectoral fins to help shimmy them backwards or if they have modified pelvic and dorsal fins they can reverse undulate those to push water forward and move themselves backward like an eel going into its "hidey" hole because it needs to be alone and listen to My Chemical Romance.

Happy Shark week from Jules of the Sea! Now make like Carcharodon carcharias and have a GREAT week!