Welcome back to the Fish Pageant for a new exciting week exploring our fin-tastic oceans in search of our Ultimate Supreme Queen Shark. Last week we talked about our sweet and sour friend Lemon Shark, who had a very impressive profile. This week we are swimming on to our next contestant, so come on down... NURSE SHARK.
The first category Nurse Shark will be judged on today is her Appearance. Her body is a deep brownish hue that often gets misinterpreted as grey and is smooth and flat as if she was run over by a cement roller; however this smoothness contributes to her silky clear skin. Her face is rounded to a soft point and her dark eyes sparkle when the sunlight hits them. Nurse shark’s most distinguishable trait are her delicate whiskers that cascade down her face. These fleshy lines that hang beneath her nose are known as barbells and they are used to help locate prey. Her prey does not stand a chance against all of her small and serrated teeth. While she could benefit from wearing a nightly retainer to straighten things out she often smiles with her mouth closed to hide the disaster inside. These traits earn Nurse Shark a score of 7.3/10 in Appearance.
The next category Nurse Shark will be competing into today is Social Skills. Nurse Shark is
considered very friendly considering she can often be found in groups with other Nurse Sharks. One group may contain over 40 sharks and they are often found cuddling and snuggling while they sleep during the day. Nurse Shark works the night shift so she often has to catch up on sleep during the day. One downfall is that males will attack females and drag them deep underwater to go on a date.
While the male means well this behavior is very strange and socially unacceptable. This earns Nurse Shark a score of 7.4/10 in Social Skills.
The next category we will be judging Nurse Shark on tonight is Career Choice.
Nurse Shark’s name originated from either the sucking sounds shes makes while sifting through the sand, which resembles that of a baby, or the archaic word, nusse, meaning cat shark. Her career choice of being a nurse may have stemmed from her name but she loves that job for so much more. Because of her docile and calm personality she is in charge of putting down the sick and injured patients. Nurse Sharks most common patients are shellfish, shrimp, squid and fish; ironically these are her favorite meals too!
Nurse Shark loves her job and works her hardest on every night shift to earn herself a good meal. This earns her a total score of 8.3/10 in Career Choice.
The final category we will be judging in the Fish Pageant tonight is Flex Score. Nurse Shark is known as the “couch potato of shark world” because she is able to lay on the ocean floor and still breath. Most of her friends need to keep swimming so they can breath but Nurse Shark has special oral muscles that suck in water and supply oxygen to the gills, this is called buccal pumping. The next major flex held by the nurse shark is sometimes when hunting for prey instead of swimming like a basic shark she is able to walk on her pectoral fins. This allows her to sneak up on unaccepted prey and use her most powerful flex- her mouth. Her mouth is a vacuum that sucks up prey into a tunnel of backward curling teeth. All of these amazing talents give Nurse Shark a Flex Score of 9.6/10.
The lovely and talented Nurse Shark has been an excellent contestant this week on the fin-tastic Fish Pageant. I'm sure all these scores will make her a front runner for our Ultimate Supreme Queen Shark. The average of her scores tonight earn her an overall score of 8.15/10!