The Sharks— Part One 



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As they swim behind each other, their dorsal and tail fins high above 

 the surface, Basking sharks have inspired tales of living sea serpents. 

 Shark-hunter P. Fitzgerald O'Connor, in his book Shark-O!, tells of see- 

 ing numerous Basking sharks "head to tail in one long sinuous line . . . 

 as far as the eye could see and further." The long line moved slowly. 

 The sharks did not appear to be eating. "It seemed to us in that evening 

 light," O'Connor wrote, "that some basic animal force was indeed at 

 work— that every shark in the area must have been brought to this 

 particular part of the coast at this particular hour by some irresistible 

 urge in its being." 



O'Connor, fishing in the Little Minch of the Scottish Hebrides, caught 

 two sharks from this school and discovered that the snouts of each were 

 a "mass of raw bleeding flesh, skinned for a good twelve inches back 

 from the tips ... by the continuous grinding against the sharp den- 

 ticles on the hide of the beast in front." 



Basking sharks grow to a length of 40 and perhaps 50 feet. Their 

 weight is measured in tons. A 30-footer landed in 1931 in Monterey, 

 California, weighed 8,600 pounds. Much larger ones have been landed 

 and weighed— in stupendous pieces— recently in Scotland. Writing of the 

 problems of dissecting such ponderous specimens. Dr. L. Harrison 

 Matthews, director of the Zoological Society of London, and Dr. H. W. 

 Parker of the British Museum, remarked: "Woe betide the anatomist 

 who inadvertently punctures the stomach and releases something like a 

 ton of semi-digested plankton." They gave these weights to chunks 

 chopped from a 29-footer: head, 1 ton; liver, 1,850 pounds; fins, 1 ton; 

 tail, ^2 ton; skin, 1 ton; meat and back, 3,000 pounds; guts, Y^ ton; con- 

 tents of stomach and intestines, V2 to 1 ton. Total: not quite 7 tons! 



The Basking shark {Cetorhinus maximus). 



Courtesy, Fisheries Research Board of Canada 



