Mantis shrimp to honey badger: Google Doodle reveals your animal avatar on Earth Day

From a moving animation with ‘Cold Cold Heart’ as background music on Valentine’s Day to letting users play a mini-Pacman game, Google has often found ways to make the internet a lot more fun with its Google Doodle. [caption id=“attachment_2206558” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Image Courtesy: Google[/caption] On Tuesday, to raise awareness about Earth Day and make protection of the environment much more entertaining, Google came out with yet another interactive doodle, which appears to have taken cue from the Facebook questionnaires we love to take to find out which Friends character we are or what kind of personality we have. This time, however, when you click on the Google icon with the rotating earth on its webpage, the website asks you: Which animal are you? Google, with some eccentric humour, tells you that  in five steps.

So, the first question which Google asks you is about your social habits. Who knew the choice of playing video games all by yourself or partying with your friends could decide whether your animal avatar would be social or solitary?

It’s really tough to figure out what the link is between animals and a person’s reaction to a best friend showing up at a party wearing the same outfit. However when one of the options given to you is to actually fight your best friend for daring to wear the same outfit, the questionaire becomes all the more interesting.  

This question makes perfect sense. It is direct and asks you about your food habits, which would naturally determine whether your animal avatar would be a herbivore, carnivore or omnivore. But if you had started missing the weird humour of the questions, the next question brings it back completely.

If the options for the answers in the question about your best friend wearing the same outfit seemed to have no connection with animals, Google reverses this by giving you options which are common animal characteristics, but don’t really count as something humans would do. Only the last option - ‘old-fashiones values’ - is something some humans would look for in a partner. You have to wonder, though, about the kind of world we would be living in if our love lives were decided by loud grunting sounds and bright colours

In the last question, maybe Google  couldn’t pen down the ever-ending list of hobbies and  simply decided to bundle it together as  ’none of the above’.  But it sure is tempting to click on ‘feats of strength’ and feel like a superhero.

And finally, you get the result. Whether you’re a honey badger, mantis shrimp, cuttlefish, sea otter or giant squid, Google doesn’t disappoint with a rather unique answer.