SHARKS 39 



sharks. Nevertheless, the Blue Shark cannot be entirely 

 acquitted of a liking for living human flesh, and large indivi- 

 duals must always be regarded as dangerous. The Ganges 

 Shark is said to be particularly savage, and not infrequently 

 to seize the arm or leg of an incautious native bather. The 

 commonest accidents with Blue Sharks occur when one has 

 been hooked and hauled on board a boat, or when one has 

 become entangled in a net and efforts are made to capture it 

 or to cut it adrift. A snap of its powerful jaws with their 

 jagged teeth, or even a blow of the tail, will cause a lot of 

 damage. 



There is a strong superstition among seafaring men that 

 when a sailor dies at sea these sharks will gather in the wake 

 of the ship to await the committal of the body to the deep. 

 It is, of course, obvious that the presence of the sharks is 

 quite fortuitous, but the belief persists, and the sailor's hatred 

 of them is very real. Should a shark be captured he will 

 frequently torment it without mercy before finally killing it 

 and throwing it back into the sea. Happily for the shark, 

 it seems to possess very little susceptibility to pain, although 

 its tenacity of life is prodigious. Mr. Couch mentions an 

 individual which, having been thrown into the sea after the 

 removal of its liver, pursued and endeavoured to seize a 

 mackerel. An American observer tells us that " a blue 

 shark, horribly mutilated by repeated thrusts of a whaleman's 

 blubber-spade, was seen to return immediately to the whale 

 upon which it had been feeding and to continue ravenously 

 until it practically died in the act, and sank slowly into the 

 dark depths of the sea ". There is an even more amazing 

 record of a Shark that had been cut open, gutted, and returned 

 to the sea, which was subsequently caught on a hook baited 

 with its own intestines ! 



Comparatively little is known of the breeding habits of the 

 Blue Sharks. The young of the Great Blue Shark in the 

 Mediterranean and Atlantic are born about May or June, and 

 as many as 30 or more have been counted in a single female. 

 The ancient writers credited the Blue Shark with being a 

 devoted parent— a fact that was celebrated in verse by Oppian 

 at the beginning of the third century, a.d. It was even 

 seriously stated that when danger threatened the young took 



