a world in which people are multiplying faster than 

 sponges, has made sponges more and more difficult 

 to collect. Men must now use special diving equip- 

 ment and go farther and farther from shore, so the 

 price has risen accordingly. The more exacting pro- 

 fessional users continue to buy the finest Mediter- 

 ranean sponges for surgical and hygienical prepara- 

 tions, for dressing leather, for applying glaze to pot- 

 tery, and for scouring and sponging cloth. Fine 

 sponges are also used by jewelers, silversmiths, and 

 lithographers. The great bulk of commercial sponges 

 like the sheepswool, which are used for cleaning 

 walls and automobiles and railroad cars, have in our 

 century come mostly from the Gulf of Mexico and 

 from the Caribbean grounds. Some sponge fishing is 

 done in the Philippines, but it is of minor importance 

 in the world market. An excellent and accessible ac- 

 count of commercial sponge fishing and sponge prep- 

 aration, with a list of the chief commercial species 

 and the areas from which they come, is P. Galtsoff's 

 article in the Encyclopaedia Biitaimica. 



The last "normal" year for sponge fishing was 

 1938, when more than two million tons of sponges 

 were harvested, about 30 per cent of them from the 

 United States fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico. In that 

 year a disease struck at the 180,000 cuUivated 



sponges that were being grown from sponge cuttings 

 fastened down in artificial beds at Water Cay in the 

 Bahamas. From there the disease rapidly spread to 

 the natural beds of Cuba, northwest Florida, and 

 British Honduras, where 700,000 sponge cuttings 

 were killed. When the authors visited a Cuban fish- 

 ery in June of 1939 the local fleet of sponge-fishing 

 boats was tied up in the harbor, and the townspeople 

 were desperately anxious for someone to minister to 

 their dying source of livelihood. One old man brought 

 us a sick sponge in a bucket of sea water and handed 

 it over as tenderly as if it were an ailing child. When 

 we went out with several fishermen to hook a few 

 sponges from the sea bottom, we had difficulty in 

 finding a healthy one. The disease was finally diag- 

 nosed by biologists as being due to a fungus, though 

 some doubts remained. Useless sponges like the log- 

 gerhead were unaffected, but the valuable commer- 

 cial species were all but wiped out. After reaching a 

 mortality as high as 95 per cent in the worst areas, the 

 disease began to subside. But the damage to the in- 

 dustry was long-lasting. Synthetic sponge competi- 

 tion was encouraged, and rising costs in overfished 

 beds did the rest. In recent years sponge production 

 in the United States has been as low as 6 per cent 

 of the 1936 value. 



66] 



