Fishes of the Western North Atlantic 73 



From earliest times the fins of certain sharks have been highly prized as food in 

 China and Japan because of their gelatin content, and often the demand has exceeded the 

 supply. We regret that statistics are lacking for the total amounts marketed. However, 

 as long ago as 1850 not less than 40,000 sharks were caught yearly in the Arabian Sea, 

 chiefly for the export of fins to China.^° Until the recent war, supplies were regularly 

 drawn from as far afield as California. In fact, the species from which the fins are taken 

 there {Galeorhinus galeus) has been known locally as Soupfin Shark, although at present 

 the name Oil Shark is more commonly applied to it. 



The kinds of sharks which have firm meat are better food fish than is generally ap- 

 preciated, and various species are regularly placed for sale in the fish markets of the tem- 

 perate parts of the world. In Chile, for example, 2.7 million pounds of sharks (about lO 

 per cent of the total catch of fish in all categories) were landed in 1940 to be consumed 

 locally.''^ Local consumption may be considerable in northern Europe also where the 

 Spiny Dogfish {Squalus acanthias, p. 462) is in demand. Along the coasts of the United 

 States the larger sharks have been increasingly marketable of late years. EflForts have also 

 been made by the United States Bureau of Fisheries to promote the sale of canned meat 

 from the Spiny Dogfish (p. 462) as "gray fish," but the project failed when discoloration 

 and spoilage resulted from the generation of ammonia in the cans due to the high content 

 of urea in shark flesh. 



It has long been known that the hides of many of the larger sharks yield leather com- 

 paring favorably with cowhide, and minor fisheries for this purpose have been carried on in 

 various parts of the world. In the western North Atlantic these fisheries have been located 

 off southern Massachusetts, North Carolina, eastern Florida, Key West, Florida, the 

 Bahamas, and among the Virgin Islands. Up to the present time, however, the amount of 

 shark leather marketed has been very small, as compared with leather from domestic ani- 

 mals. In some cases the fisheries have been short-lived, because of depletion of the local 

 stock of sharks which are large enough to be serviceable (for local instance, see p. 104). 

 But in regions where a fishery may be expected to draw its supply of sharks from a wide 

 area, as on the east coast of Florida with the Gulf Stream near at hand, the prospects of 

 commercial success appear to depend chiefly on an expansion of the demand for shark 

 leather. 



The dermal denticles of many sharks are so sharp and so close set that the skins make 

 an effective abrasive, and shark skin, often known as "shagreen," was formerly in wide 

 use by cabinet makers the world over for polishing wood, but it has been almost entirely 

 supplanted of late by other recently developed abrasives, except perhaps in remote parts 

 of the world. 



At the present time shark scrap, like other fish scrap, is in demand for feeding poultry 

 and other livestock, and in sum total considerable amounts are marketed. However, we find 



io. See Buist (Proc. zool. Soc. Lond., /*, 1850: 100) for an account of the Karachi Fishery in India. 

 21. Fiedler, Geog. Rev., 5^, 1944: 104. 



