SHARKS — MAN-EATEHS AXD OTHERS 



355 



Tiorth of Cape Cod. Coming along onr 

 shores in schools containing untold mil- 

 lions, and one school following another 

 often with slight intermission, these 

 fishes do immense damage for fishermen 

 by devouring or mutilating the food fish 

 taken in the gill nets, by eating the bait 

 and the line-caught fish, by chewing and 

 tearing nets and lines, by filling pound 

 nets to the exclusion of other fish, and 

 by devouring lobsters in and out of the 

 lobster pots. When the schools of 

 dogfish appear, the fishermen must 

 abandon their efforts, and the loss of 

 fish and apparatus is thus supplemented 

 by loss of time. There have been 

 seasons when the damage to the fisheries 

 of the New England coast by this one 

 species has been fully a million dollars. 

 The loss is accentuated by failure of the 

 fishermen to make any use whatever of 

 the dogfish because of the lack of a 

 market demand in the United States, 

 notwithstanding that the fish is whole- 

 some and nutritious and is very exten- 

 sively eaten in western and southern 

 Europe. 



One of the great American needs at the 

 present time is the shark-eating man. 

 All sharks of sufficient size have a food 

 value, and in many parts of the world 

 sharks are regularly fished for and 

 used for human consumption. In the 

 United States the utilization of sharks 

 has been negligible for several reasons; 

 notably because of the abundance and 

 variety of other food fish, and because of 

 our ignorance of their food value, and 

 our deep-seated prejudice on account of 

 their unsa^'ory reputation as consumers 

 of the most promiscuous materials, in- 

 cluding living and dead human beings. 

 It ma;^' prove to ha\'e been a very un- 

 fortunate coincidence that the killing 

 of Americans by sharks should have 

 come at the very time when the Bureau 

 of Fisheries was inaugurating a campaign 



to induce the wholesale consumption by 

 Americans of one of the most destructive, 

 though least dangerous, species of sharks. 

 It remains to be seen whether, in spite 

 of this untimely handicap, a movement 

 in the interest of fishermen and fish con- 

 sumers, l:)ased on indisputable economic 

 facts, will not succeed. 



The Congress of the United States, at 



Pholo by J. T. Nichols 

 The abundant and destructive "smooth dogfish" 

 {Galeorhinus laevis) 



the recent session, appropriated $25,000 

 to enable the Commissioner of Fisheries 

 to conduct investigations and experi- 

 ments for the purpose of ameliorating 

 the damage to the fisheries done by the 

 dogfish and other predacious fishes. 

 The act is aimed primarily at the spiny 

 dogfish, and the task before the Bureau 

 of Fisheries is to convert an unmiti- 

 gated nuisance into a valuable asset. 



