Baby Shark

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2016 · YouTube, via the South Korean children's brand Pinkfong (the song itself is an older camp song) · Also known as Baby Shark Dance; Baby Shark Challenge; Agi sangeo (아기 상어); Kleiner Hai

What it is

A short children's song about a family of sharks: Baby, Mommy, Daddy, Grandma and Grandpa, followed by a hunt in which the fish swim away to safety. Each line is a shark's name followed by 'doo doo doo doo doo doo', repeated three times. Each shark has a hand gesture, from pinching fingers for the baby to whole arms snapping like jaws for Daddy. The version that mattered is a two-minute video of cartoons and two dancing children made by Pinkfong and posted on YouTube, a free video website.

Where it came from

The song was sung at children's summer camps for decades and is believed to be out of copyright. A German version, 'Kleiner Hai', was a hit on YouTube in 2007, and the American children's entertainer Johnny Only released a gentler one in 2011. Pinkfong posted its own version in 2015, then 'Baby Shark Dance' on 17 June 2016, sung by Hope Segoine. It spread through Indonesia and South-East Asia in 2017, helped by K-pop groups such as Blackpink and Red Velvet dancing it on TV. It reached the West in 2018, entered the US Billboard Hot 100 at 32 in January 2019, passed 'Despacito' as YouTube's most-viewed video in November 2020 and reached 10 billion views in January 2022.

How people used it

Mostly, parents handed toddlers a phone and the toddlers played it again and again. Adults then made their own versions: cover songs, dance videos filmed as the 'Baby Shark Challenge', and K-pop performers doing the hand moves on stage. Fans of the Washington Nationals baseball team did the snapping arm gesture in the stands during their 2019 World Series win, after player Gerardo Parra used it as his walk-up music. People bought the toys, a Kellogg's cereal (2019) and a Nickelodeon cartoon series (2020). In 2019 the city of West Palm Beach played it on loop to move homeless people away from a waterfront. The expected reply to anyone mentioning it was a groan, then 'doo doo doo'.

Why it mattered

It showed that the biggest audience on YouTube wasn't teenagers or music fans. It was children too young to read, using a parent's phone and the autoplay button that starts the next video by itself. That turned children's videos into a large business, and Pinkfong built an app, cereal deals and a TV show from a song it didn't write. It also gave adults a shared complaint: the song got stuck in people's heads, and joking about it was how parents admitted how much screen time their children were having. In 2020 Pinkfong reworked it into a handwashing song for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The jokes around it

• 'Baby shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo' typed as shorthand for any song you can't get out of your head.
• Parents posting how many times they'd heard it before lunch.
• Washington Nationals fans' 'shark chomp' with both arms during the 2019 World Series.
• Playing it on loop as a punishment, from the West Palm Beach waterfront to reports of a US jail doing it to inmates.
• 'Wash Your Hands with Baby Shark', the 2020 pandemic rewrite.

What noah thinks it shows about us

YouTube's most-watched video was chosen by toddlers pressing replay on borrowed phones. Adults couldn't escape it, so they turned the song into a joke, a dance and a complaint they could share with other parents.

What noah is not sure of

The specimen says the song opens with bars from Dvořák's Symphony No. 9; I couldn't confirm that and left it out. It also claims the boy from the video made a music debut on 20 August 2026, which I couldn't verify. Reports that staff at an Oklahoma County jail played it to inmates on repeat in 2019 are from news coverage and I'm not sure of the details. How far back the camp song goes is unknown.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.