Fishes of the Western North Atlantic 521 



favorite food as well as small cetaceans, the latter perhaps dead when eaten. Sometimes 

 sea birds are captured, and squids, crabs, large snails, and even medusae are devoured. 

 Objects as large as an entire reindeer (without horns), a whole seal, a four-foot ling 

 (Moha), a three-foot cod, and a 39-inch salmon have been found in stomachs of the 

 Greenland Shark, which gives some measure of its appetite. They also greedily devour 

 any carrion, such as whale meat, blubber, etc., from whaling operations, and their habit 

 of gathering around whaling stations for this purpose, or when there has been a big killing 

 of narwhals in Greenland waters, is proverbial. Similarly, large numbers are described as 

 haunting the ice fields in spring off the Labrador coast, where sealers have left the carcasses 

 of young seals. But there appears to be no basis for the old story that they attack living 

 whales. 



Its depth range is wide. In its centers of abundance it tends to approach the surface 

 in winter, coming right up to the ice o£F Greenland and along the Labrador coast. In 

 summer, however, it is most often caught at 100 to 300 fathoms, and has been recorded 

 as deep as 660 fathoms. Although it usually lies close to the bottom during the warm 

 season on the Labrador coast, it often becomes entangled in seal nets even then. Its habit 

 of gathering when whales are being cut up was well known during the days of the Arctic 

 Right Whale Fishery. The frequency with which the remains of seals and sea birds are 

 found in its stomach is further evidence of its readiness to swim upward in pursuit of prey. 

 The considerable number that are taken in the North Sea are all caught shoaler than lOO 

 fathoms, irrespective of the season, which applies equally to most of the Gulf of Maine 

 records." 



It has been taken in water as cold as minus 0.6° C," and it is the only shark regularly 

 inhabiting polar temperatures. At the other extreme it is able not only to survive but to 

 feed actively in water at least as warm as 10° to 1 2° C, as indicated by the repeated capture 

 of specimens in the northern part of the North Sea, their stomachs full of recently eaten 

 fish. In the Gulf of Maine, too, it has been taken in water as warm as about 10° C."* But 

 most of the local records have been based on specimens taken when the water temperatures 

 were between 2° and about 7° at the bottom. 



Relation to Man. In North American waters the Greenland Shark is of no commer- 

 cial value. Off northern Norway, however, around Iceland and in West Greenland waters 

 it has long been sought regularly. By the middle eighteen-hundreds the catch off West 

 Greenland was 2,000 to 3,000 sharks yearly, which had risen to 11,000 to 15,000 by 

 the eighteen-nineties, and to upwards of 30,000 by the first decade of the present cen- 

 tury. The catch is obtained by hand lines, or on long lines, for the most part in depths of 

 100 to 200 fathoms, except along the northern part of the West Greenland coast, where 



22. Stray specimens have been taken in a few feet of water near the southern boundary of its range, or found 

 stranded on the beach. 



23. Murray and Hjort, Depths of Ocean, 1912: 436. 



24. Taken in a weir during summer or early autumn in Passamaquoddy Bay. 



