What Are The Fastest Sharks In The World?
It's never too early to start getting in shape for swimsuit season. Especially if you wear your swimsuit to swim. And even more so if you choose to swim ... with the sharks.
And no, we aren't talking about a metaphor for business tycoons or even the kid with the lemonade stand who bought out all the other lemonade stands and cornered the business and sold it to her little brother at a profit. Not those sharks.
We're talking about fish, fish with teeth, fish of various nightmares and cinematic thrill rides, themselves various in their quality. (In his 2018 memoir Blowing the Bloody Doors Off, Michael Caine wrote of his appearance in Jaws 4, "I've never seen the movie, but I have seen the house it paid for, and it's fabulous.")
According to Smithsonian Ocean, there are more than 500 species of sharks sharing the watery landscapes of Planet Earth. Some are faster than others. Some are much faster. Much, much faster.
Mind you, sharks aren't the biggest fish in the sea. Nor are they the fastest swimmers by far. According to the BBC's program Science Focus, they're outrun (well, you know what we mean) by blue marlins, garden-variety marlins, striped Marlins, and sailfish. Also the wahoo, which sounds fun.
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Sharksider has its own listing of shark speeds. The great white shark (you can hear the music, can't you) is only third, at 25 miles an hour, but still, imagine getting hit at that speed by anything weighing well over three tons. Not to mention teeth. Oh, so many teeth. Coming in second is the salmon shark. They've been known to crack 50 miles an hour. Oh, and they hunt in packs.
And finally, we come to the finny champ: the mako shark, which is very swift indeed, clocking in at 60 miles an hour. (For the English majors, that translates into a mile a minute.) The largest ones grow to about 14 feet in length and between 300-400 pounds. Which includes the teeth.
So, if you're set on swimming with the sharks, in an actual-swim-with-actual-sharks-kind-of-way, you might think about taking along a boat. You'll probably need a bigger boat. Faster wouldn't hurt, either.