A requiem shark — possibly a bull shark or bronze whaler — swam into a narrow canal in Busan's North Port on September 18 and hasn't found its way out. Two weeks later, the animal has a name (Bukangi, after the Korean name for the North Port), an honorary ambassadorship (91% approval in a social media poll), and roughly 600,000 visitors who've come to gawk. During the four-day Chuseok holiday alone, the waterfront park drew nearly half a million people, against a normal weekend baseline of around 2,000. Busan Mayor Chun Jae-soo thanked the shark for publicity he said would otherwise have cost "trillions" — the kind of municipal PR number that sounds made up because it is, but the underlying point is real. Shark-shaped ice cream sales spiked. Shares in Pinkfong Company, the studio behind "Baby Shark," rose about 7% on the hype. The internet did what it does: false sightings, rumors of a second shark or a pup, and the inevitable tide of AI-generated garbage. The rescue effort, meanwhile, has been a polite comedy of failure. Coast Guard vessels sprayed jets of water behind the shark trying to push it seaward. The shark simply dodged the streams without heading anywhere useful. A net-guided attempt was being planned for Friday, per the Chosun Daily. Nobody has yet asked the shark what it wants. South Korea has a recent pattern here. In April, a young wolf named Neukgu escaped a zoo and spent nine days at large before recapture, generating a similar frenzy. Germany had its own version this year with "Timmy," a beached humpback whale named after the Baltic coast beach where it stranded. The formula is reliable: animal in wrong place plus social media plus a slow news week equals instant folk hero. What makes the Bukangi story tick isn't the shark. It's the velocity of the mythology machine — a living animal becomes a brand, a stock-market catalyst, and a tourism product within days, all while actual marine biologists try to solve a straightforward navigation problem. The shark doesn't know it's famous. The city doesn't care, as long as the visitors keep coming. The tension between spectacle and welfare is real but unresolved. Half a million visitors crowding a waterfront doesn't help a disoriented predator find open ocean. The rescue attempts read more like choreographed public events than serious marine biology. If the net operation fails, the question becomes how long Busan lets its honorary ambassador stay stuck in a canal before the story stops being charming. Bukangi is less a news story and more a case study in how modern attention economies metabolize the natural world. The shark is real. Everything around it — the polls, the stock bumps, the ice cream — is performance. The animal's actual predicament is the least interesting thing about this to almost everyone involved, which tells you everything about what kind of story this really is.
