Shark Treasures 183 



the huge fish was designed for a fish somewhat smaller. It was a sardine 

 plant! 



The price for livers eventually dropped to a point where the am- 

 phibious sharkers were getting less than $35 for a 5 -ton fish that took 

 an airplane, a Duck, and a crew of men to land. And finally, if not 

 inevitably, the s^reat Basking shark adventure collapsed. By 1953, Basking 

 shark fishing in California was described by the State Department of 

 Fish and Game as sporadic. 



Sharks are often enemies of man, but the brigand can yield bounty, 

 too. For the shark is a valuable fish. Locked in the livers of some sharks 

 are oils often more potent in vitamins than cod liver oil, and a chemical 

 found in the liver is leading medical researchers down promising new 

 avenues in the search for ways to destroy two enemies of man far 

 deadlier than the shark— cancer and heart disease. The denticle-armored 

 skin is stronger than cowhide. 



Though the shark is a cornucopia of the sea, many attempts to bring 

 this treasure to shore have ended in failure. When the stakes have been 

 high enough, men have sought the shark, and the shark has made some 

 of them rich. But, even when man's avarice is pitted against the shark, 

 the odds of survival are on the shark. 



In 1938, sharks accidentally caught by U.S. fishermen were con- 

 sidered worthless predators of useful fish, whose destruction of nets cost 

 fishermen much more than they could ever make by selling the sharks' 

 carcasses. The top price was $10 a ton. Most carcasses were ground up 

 and used for fertilizer. 



Then the war in Europe began. German troops overran Norway, 

 and abruptly a major source of a vital commodity was cut oflr from 

 Great Britain and the United States— cod liver oil. Millions of pounds of 

 cod liver oil had been exported for many years from Norway to the 

 United States and England. Vitamin A was extracted from the oil and 

 added not only to human diets but also to the diets of livestock and 

 poultry. In both countries, a search began for new sources of the vitamin. 



In San Francisco, Tano Guaragnella, a wholesale fish broker, heard 

 about the hunt for a substitute source of vitamin A. On a hunch, Gua- 

 ragnella took some fresh shark liver to a chemist for analysis. The liver, 

 from a dogfish {Squalus acanthias), produced an astonishing assay. There 

 was ten times more vitamin A in the dogfish's liver than was usually 

 found in the liver of the cod (Gadus woriia). 



Guaragnella went back to the docks and, as casually as he could, 

 dropped the word to fishermen that he would pay $25 a ton for dog- 

 fish. The fishermen thought he was crazy, but they started landing the 

 "worthless" dogfish, of which there had never been a shortage on their 

 fishing grounds. 



Soon after he made his discovery about the dogfish liver's vitamin 



