342 Shark and Company 



the river route, the mystery is still not fully solved, for there is no 

 obvious explanation of what lured them into the lake. 



Sharks have given birth when captured in the lake, but whether they 

 breed there is not definitely known. Certainly they have been prolific. 

 A woman who caught sharks for a living reported in 1953 a catch of 

 2,008 of them in 6 months. A fisherman at the same time told of catch- 

 ing nearly 7,000 in 8 months. Only two, he said, were tintoreros. These 

 may sound Hke fish stories, but it is a matter of record that so abundant 

 —and notorious— were the sharks of Lake Nicaragua that a bounty on 

 them was posted by Granada authorities. In recent years, sharks have not 

 been as plentiful in the lake. Perhaps the bounty-hunters are fishing them 

 out. Or perhaps the rapids and the silt in the San Juan are inexorably 

 forming a barrier to the lake. 



The Lake Nicaragua shark is usually cited as the only shark that lives 

 in fresh water. But sharks have been seen, with varying degrees of 

 certitude, from the tranquil Derwent River in Tasmania to the busy 

 Hudson River in New York. The farthest upriver appearance of a shark 

 in the Hudson occurred in 1925, when a 700-pounder of unidentified 

 species was washed up on the shore near Marlboro, New York, some 50 

 miles north of New York Bay. The shark apparently had been struck 

 by a steamboat. In 1933, New York City police flashed a teletyped shark 

 alarm to all precincts and to New York State communities along the 

 Hudson as far north as Poughkeepsie. The alarm followed the sighting 

 of at least one shark by several fishermen, off the West 42nd Street 

 docks, exactly six blocks west of Times Square. 



In the headwaters of the Amazon, near Iquitos, Peru— 2,300 miles 

 from the mouth of the great river— a shark of an unknown species has 

 been caught. In landlocked Paraguay, sharks have been reported. In the 

 rivers that flow through the sparsely explored or unmapped jungles 

 of South and Central America, explorers have heard tales of sharks. 



A little tropical Atlantic Carcharhinid shark, the Sharp-Nosed shark 

 (Scoliodon terrae-novae) , has been known to stray a couple of miles up 

 the Pascagoula River in Mississippi, but it is normally found only in 

 coastal waters, as is the Pacific coast Sharp-Nosed (Scoliodon longurio). 



A close relative, Scoliodon ivalbeehmi, lives in the Indian Ocean. This 

 shark's peregrinations into fresh water, however, are more venturesome 

 than those of the Sharp-Nosed. In Thailand, as a matter of fact, it is 

 best known as a lake fish. It feeds on the young turtles of the Lake of the 

 Tale Sap, and is common in the Patalung River, which flows into the 

 lake. 



Sharks were once pursued up the Perak River in Malaya by an 

 American physiologist who, oddly enough, was studying the human 

 kidney. He reported that sharks, including known man-eaters, went as 



