At least at the start of the series, Sandy is othered for being a land creature unable to breathe underwater. However, when you think about it, Sandy is vastly more closely related to 90% of Bikini Bottom’s citizens (fish) and to Pearl than to literally anyone else.

  • Sandy Cheeks and Pearl Krabs are both mammals: class Mammalia, subphylum Vertebrata, phylum Chordata.
  • Fish are… honestly a lot of things – highly nonspecific. So we’ll just genericize it and say they’re also all under subphylum Vertebrata.
  • Patrick Star (sea star) is more closely related to the sea cucumber Kevin that he and SpongeBob idolize: both phylum Echinodermata. He’s the second-closest to the fish etc., as he’s also under superphylum Deuterostomia.
  • Mr. Krabs and Larry the Lobster are expectedly related (suborder Pleocyemata, order Decapoda), but they’re also related to Plankton (copepod) under the superclass Multicrustacea. If you go far enough up the tree, these three are all more closely related to the nematodes than to the other cast (superphylum Ecdysozoa).
  • Squidward (cephalopod) and Gary (gastropod) are similarly far out, being molluscs (along with bivalves, e.g. the ones used as a stand-in for birds). If you go far enough up the tree, they’re more closely related to annelids like the (fake) Alaskan Bull Worm than any of the other cast.
  • SpongeBob is a sponge (phylum Porifera). He’s the furthest one out by far. Everyone else is in the animal subkingdom Eumetazoa, but not SpongeBob. The jellyfish (phylum Cnidaria) are closer to everyone else than SpongeBob is.

Here’s a really janky representation of how insanely far apart they are with a very high-level tree of life:

Zoomed-out SpongeBob tree of life

  • ivanafterall ☑️@lemmy.worldEnglish
    161·
    22 hours ago

    Fish are… honestly a lot of things – highly nonspecific.

    Ex-CUSE me!? What the hell? Fish are fucking fish. I can’t handle this kind of paradigm shift right now, don’t tell me we don’t even understand fish. Have I been lied to?

    • magikmw@piefed.socialEnglish
      6·
      13 hours ago

      We’re basically fish, we just carry our own salty water around in skinsacks.

      Also, all naturally occuring ice is basically rocks, and obviously molten rocks are lava, so we’re carrying lava in our bodies, which makes us lava monsters.

      Also also, your (and mine) digestive system is just a tube of outside inside our bodies, so we are torus-shaped fish lava monsters.

      You’re welcome.

        • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          12·
          20 hours ago
          • A bee is more closely related to a hermit crab than it is to a spider (both arthropod subphylum Crustacea).
          • A spider is more closely related to a horseshoe crab than it is to a bee (both arthropod subphylum Chelicerata).
          • A deer is more closely related to a killer whale (order Artiodactyla) than it is to a human (order Primates).
          • Jumi@lemmy.world
            4·
            14 hours ago

            So fish are like trees, they look somewhat similar but are completely different?

            • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
              3·
              14 hours ago

              Id personally compare them to fungi, the fish body plan predates trees which is partly why this happens. Turns out that when a body plan predates land life by a significant degree it ends up being quite weird, no I’m not counting the weirdos who happened to go on land before the moss started to get a foothold if you count them then I am sea life.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      161·
      22 hours ago

      Yup! You’ll be happy to know, though, that amphibians (class Amphibia), mammals (class Mammalia), birds (class Avia), and reptiles (class Reptilia) all have their own pigeonholes.

      What you won’t be happy to know is that a lot of things that are called “shrimp” aren’t actually shrimp. Shrimp are specifically the decapod infraorder Caridea. Anything else – presented in order of decreasing relatedness – like prawns (decapod suborder Dendrobranchiata), amphipods (order Amphipoda), or mantis shrimp (order Stomatopoda) are not shrimp.