188 Man a?id Shark 



chopped into fist-sized chunks, were rendered down in big vats. The 

 oil was skimmed off, cooled, canned, and shipped to U.S. dealers for 

 about $4.75 a gallon, depending on its vitamin potency. The process re- 

 quired little skill and paid big dividends. 



From Ketchikan to Monterey on the West Coast of America, in the 

 little towns of the Caribbean, in fishing ports where the shark had been 

 a feared and hated enemy for generations, suddenly it was a boon. 

 The shark was giving men profits instead of stealing them. 



But the intensive research into vitamin A was to have an ironic twist. 

 Thanks to the abundance of vitamin A provided by the shark, scientists 

 came to know the vitamin so well that they discovered how to make it. 

 Vitamin A was synthesized. 



By 1950, the shark boom was over. It took some time for production 

 of the man-made vitamin A to supplant the natural vitamin obtained 

 from shark liver oil but, one by one, the shark fisheries folded up. In 

 CaHfornia, where nearly 53,000,000 pounds of shark had been landed in 

 a single year, shark catches shrank to a Uttle more than 1,000,000 pounds 

 and finally dropped to the insignificant pre-boom level. In Washington 

 State, where as much as $3,000,000 worth of sharks had been caught in 

 a single boom year, dogfish livers began selling at 10 cents a pound, 

 and the total value of shark livers plummeted in 1953 to $3,000. Borden's 

 Elsie no longer had competition from any shark. In 1950, Borden went 

 out of the shark business. Cojimar managed to hold out until 1958, when 

 the little shark-oil factory shut down, and, once more, the shark became 

 a nuisance or an enemy. 



A 1956 survey of California waters showed that the Soupfin, whose 

 ranks had been thinned by the shark-oil boom, was again abundant. By 

 careful fishing of all the shark species, the survey showed, from one to 

 two billion pounds of shark could be caught a year within the range 

 of California's fishing fleets. All that was needed was a market . . . 

 But a market was no longer there. 



The menhaden is a prolific fish used almost entirely for processing 

 into feed rather than for human consumption. It is a valuable commercial 

 fish in the United States and is sought by fleets of boats. But it is also 

 sought by sharks, and, as the great schools of menhaden sweep up and 

 down the East Coast or through the Gulf of Mexico, they are inevitably 

 accompanied by sharks, which take a heavy toll. In a letter to one of 

 the authors, Harvey W. Smith of the J. Howard Smith Company, a 

 major menhaden fishery, reported that his boats sometimes net as many 

 as 70 to 800 sharks a day in the Gulf of Mexico. These 4- to 6-foot 

 sharks do damage which, Smith said, "is beyond one's imagination." He 

 added that the company spent $20,000 to repair or replace shark-ravaged 

 nets in a single five-month season. 



