We are getting our first non-fish pet. My son made a case for getting a hamster, so he’ll soon have a new roommate. Looking into what we'd be signing up for got me thinking about different factors of pet ownership, and what types of pets people prefer. I chose the scatter plot because it seemed ideal to show multiple variables in one place.

I researched the 16 most popular pets in the U.S., and set the scatter plot to display:

- Type (icon animal)
- Category (icon color)
- Popularity (icon size)
- Lifespan (icon position on y axis)
- Hours spent sleeping (icon position on x axis)

Something I noticed is that our pets sleep a lot! Especially considering many of them are nocturnal (another parameter I wanted to include but couldn’t figure out a great way to do it). Did you know that there are more sleep states than nocturnal and diurnal? Turns out there’s also “crepuscular” (an animal that is active during twilight periods), and a couple others. And supposedly dogs aren’t any of these options—they just kind of adapt to their owner (and try to nap as much as they can).

View this challenge on Storytelling With Data: face your fear: xenographphobia