A report by Elinor Roberts, Mrs. Fiction’s 4th Grade

I was very upset to see ‘dolphins and sharks’ on the list of report topics for ‘things kids get confused,’ and that’s why I chose them for my report. Nobody should confuse dolphins and sharks, Mrs. Fiction.

I read a lot of books for this report, but all of them were wrong, so I will just tell you the truth.

A lot of people think dolphins are aliens, or angels, or something, because they are so smart. But it’s not dolphins that are aliens, it’s sharks!

Sharks came down to Earth a loooooong time ago, like 300 million years. We know this because there are places, like in Montana, where a huge strangely-shaped landing party was buried and preserved so we would know the truth. Sharks don’t make good fossils because their skeletons are made of cartilage, which is deliberate so that we can’t trace their movements over the planet’s history! Anyway, when they came there were all sorts of them, but soon they settled down to ruling our oceans (because oceans are like three quarters of the planet) and chose the shapes they needed. There are Great Whites, which are the bosses, because in evil societies like the Empire the toughest ones are the bosses. There are the mako sharks, which are the messengers because they go very fast. There’s the hammerhead sharks, which are like the KGB, but for sharks. And whale sharks… I’m not sure, but I think if you’re bad the great whites suck out your brain and your big teeth and make you a whale shark, which is the thing sharks are really afraid of because they like eating people.

Anyway, so some people think that dolphins are angels, or can heal people, or something. I found this researching on the internet. These people are silly. Dolphins cannot heal, because they are all about killing! The closest they get to healing things is that they are like the white blood cells of the planet, stalking the virus sharks.

Dolphins kill sharks with their noses, by pummeling them in their secret vulnerable underbellies until they die. All the time that dolphins talk, they are talking about killing sharks. “There was this one time,” a bottlenose might say, “I saw this reef shark swimming by. Now he LOOKS like he’s just minding his own business, but he’s a shark, so I know that’s not true. I woulda gotten my friends, but it was just a reefie, so I knew I could take him.” They talk like that, but with more swearing. Like on NYPD Blue, not that I’ve ever seen that. Dolphins are the cops of the sea. Sometimes they swim beside ships and people think they’re so cute, but they’re really saying “Shark advisory, next 20 miles, landwalking people!” People have a lot of wrong ideas about dolphins. There were some ideas even wronger than the glowy angel healing alien dolphins, but my parents wouldn’t let me read about them.

So that’s the difference between dolphins and sharks. Sharks are evil alien overlords of the deep. Dolphins were developed by the Earth to combat their menace. Sharks are a plague on this planet, and dolphins are the cure! Not that I’ve seen The Matrix. Because I haven’t.

Elinor, usually an excellent student, received a D on this assignment, with a note that if it weren’t for the occasional fact imbedded in her nonsense, it would be an F. Sure that this meant the Carcharian Conspiracy stretched even onto the land and into the heart of her beloved teacher, Elinor worked on expanding her theory.