Fishes of the Western North Atlantic 271 



Australia in which one, after capture, vomited the entire arm of a man who had been mur- 

 dered at sea and his body dismembered." "Tigers" also join the company of various other 

 sharks that are soon attracted to the carcasses of dead horses or cattle in tropical harbors 

 in the vicinity of slaughter houses. 



Relation to Man. The "Tiger" is of considerable commercial value wherever a 

 shark fishery is actively carried on in warm seas, as in southern Florida at present and until 

 recently among the Virgin Islands, for it not only probably forms the largest single item in 

 the catches, but yields excellent leather which is used for many purposes. Its yield of liver 

 oil is also higher than that of many other tropical sharks. It likewise affords some sport to 

 anglers, for it bites readily, provided the bait is large and strong-smelling. On the other 

 hand, "these sharks are very destructive to gill nets, biting out great holes to take a single 

 fish, and swimming back and forth through the nets as they feed on the gilled fish."'* 

 Worse yet, Tiger Sharks, when they come into shallow water, may be a danger to 

 bathers; in the West Indies they are said to be considered the most dangerous of sharks. 

 Some of the many shark fatalities that are well attested in medical journals for Australian 

 waters are also credited to this species, although perhaps not on conclusive evidence. A 

 recent instance is recorded from Malwan, south of Bombay, India." 



Range. Widespread in the tropical and subtropical belts of all the oceans, inshore and 

 offshore alike. 



Occurrence in the Eastern Atlantic. In the Eastern Atlantic, positive records for the 

 Tiger Shark are comparatively few in number, i.e., for the Canaries, tropical West Africa 

 (Senegambia), western South Africa, and accidentally for Iceland.^" 



Early writers repeatedly credited it to northern Scandinavian waters and to the 

 Faroes, an error springing from the fact that Faber's account of his "arcticus'' was based on 

 a combination of the latter with Isurus nasus, the common Porbeagle of boreal waters. 

 Actually there is no positive record of the Tiger Shark for North Europe, other than the 

 one for Iceland. It has never been reported from the Mediterranean, but no doubt it is 

 much more plentiful along the tropical coast of West Africa and around the off-lying 

 islands than the paucity of published records would suggest. 



Occurrence in the Western Atlantic. This is one of the more numerous, if not the most 

 abundant, of the larger sharks in the appropriate thermal zone of the western Atlantic. 

 As with various other tropical species, its center of abundance appears to be the Carib- 

 bean-West Indian-South Florida region. Among the West Indies there is a published 

 record of it at Trinidad, Porto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Cuba, between Turks Island and 

 the Barbados, and near Nassau in the Bahamas, where it is so plentiful that 3 1 "Tigers" 



17. For account of this happening and the subsequent investigations, see Whitley (Fish. Aust., /, 1940: 34). 

 x8. Springer, Proc. Fla. Acad. Sci., 5, 1939: 16. 



19. Sarangdhar, J. Bombay nat. Hist. See, 44 (i), 1943: i04. 



20. The identity of this specimen is attested by the account of its teeth by Faber (Fische Islands, 1829: 17) and more 

 recently by Kr0yer (Danmarks Fiske, 3, 1852-1853: 933). 



