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Scary Triangles

Title text: Concealed mostly beneath the surface, sharks are the icebergs of the sea.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by the Bermuda Triangle of the sea - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.

Cueball is giving a marine biology lecture about sharks and seems to have mixed up icebergs with the topic.

In pop culture, sharks will often approach prey or people with only their front dorsal fin visible, which looks like a triangle, above the water. As far as prey are concerned, this is inaccurate, as most sharks will attack from below to keep the element of surprise.

In the comic the joke is that Cueball reveals that only recently have marine biologists learned that the triangle is only a small part of a shark. Until this revelation they thought that a shark was only the dorsal fin, the part shown in the drawing above the water. Hence sharks were also known as scary triangles as people died when those triangles arrived. But finally the community has learned that more than 90% (i.e. the rest of the shark's body) is hidden beneath the surface. Having learned this Cueball has thus drawn a dotted outline of the shark's body, beneath the scary triangular fin, showing what a shark looks under the surface. And is now lecturing about it to spread the message.

The 90% is taken from icebergs, which are often described as having 90% of their volume underwater. This would be true for clean ice in freshwater. But in reality icebergs are filled with air cavities and floats in salt water. So although most of the icebergs are beneath the surface, it is somewhat less than 90%.

The title text continues the joke explicitly saying that sharks are icebergs of the sea, except icebergs are already in, and thus also of, the sea. Just as sharks. So this sentence makes no sense.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Cueball points with a stick to a poster behind him that has a diagram of a shark in the water with some unreadable labels pointing to its dorsal fin and gills. The outlines of the shark under the water are in dashed lines.]

Cueball: Today's marine biology lecture is on sharks. We all know them as the scary triangles of the sea, but recent research has revealed that the triangle is only a small portion of the shark - over 90% of it is hidden beneath the surface.

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