Fishes of the Western North Atlantic 139 



Habits. This is an active, strong-swimming species, putting up a dogged and savage 

 resistance to capture. The reports of it attacking boats, when harpooned or hooked, are too 

 numerous and too circumstantial to be dismissed. However, it does not have the leaping 

 habit of the Mako. So few are seen that nothing is known of its life apart from the fore- 

 going and the fact that it is voracious. The great majority of records have been of speci- 

 mens taken at the surface or close to it. But it appears that they may descend to consider- 

 able depths, for a large one caught off the north coast of Cuba, of which we have a photo- 

 graph, was said to have been hooked at a depth of 700 fathoms. Nothing is known of its 

 breeding habits. 



Characterization of this Shark by an earlier student as "the most voracious of 

 fish-like vertebrates,""' is no doubt well deserved. The frequency with which it captures 

 large prey, which it devours practically intact, is illustrated by the presence of other sharks 

 from four to seven feet long, as well as a young sea lion of 100 pounds, in the stomachs 

 of White Sharks} also seals, sturgeons and tuna have been found in specimens no larger 

 than eight to nine feet. Sea turtles are also described as a regular item in its diet in southern 

 waters. On the other hand, it also preys on a wide variety of smaller fishes and marine ani- 

 mals, including chimaeroids and squids. The mouth of a Massachusetts Bay specimen re- 

 cently examined by us was festooned with hooks and snoods from a long line, while its 

 stomach contained a spiny dogfish evidently torn off a hook. This, together with similar 

 reports by others, including the report of a large Florida specimen containing two Car- 

 charhinus milberti six to seven feet long which were evidently torn from hooks on the set- 

 line on which the Carcharodon itself was taken,^' shows that when White Sharks stray in on 

 the fishing grounds they find a convenient source of food. 



It has been described also as a scavenger when occasion offers; for example, the 

 stomach of a shark said to be this species, caught in Sydney Harbor, New South Wales, 

 contained a variety of garbage, including horse meat, legs of mutton^ parts of a pig, a 

 dog, etc. 



Relation to Man. This is perhaps the only shark against which the charge of un- 

 provoked attack on small boats is proved through identification of the teeth left imbedded 

 in the sides of the boat. It has borne an unsavory reputation from the earliest times as a 

 man-eater. It is so classed, for example, in Australia, where attacks by sharks on bathers, 

 especially near Sydney, are of such common occurrence that most of the bathing beaches 

 are protected by wire-netting enclosures."* It is not possible to tell whether men, reported 

 by earlier authors to have been found in the stomachs of White Sharks, were alive or dead 

 when eaten 5 but it is probable that a seven-foot specimen, taken a few days later in Sandy 

 Hook Bay at the mouth of New York Harbor, was responsible for four shark fatalities 



2i. Jordan, Guide to Study Fish., 1905: 538. 



23. Springer, Copeia, 2, 1939: 114. 



24. See Coppleson (Med. J. Aust., April 15, 1933: 449) and Whitley (Fish. Aust., /, 1940: 259) for circumstan- 

 tial accounts (many of them recent) of shark fatalities in Australia. In most cases the species of shark responsible 

 was not determined. 



