DESTRUCTION OF AQUATIC ANIMALS. 105 
Although the whale does not prey upon smaller creatures 
resembling himself in form and habits, yet true fishes are 
extremely voracious, and almost every tribe devours unspar- 
ingly the feebler species, and even the spawn and young of its 
own.* The enormous destruction of the shark,t the pike, the 
trout family, and other ravenous fish, as well as of the fishing 
birds, the seal, and the otter, by man, would naturally have 
occasioned a great increase in the weaker and more defenceless 
fish on which they feed, had he not been as hostile to them also 
as to their persecutors. 
Destruction of Aquatic Animals. 
It does not seem probable that man, with all his rapacity 
and all his enginery, will succeed in totally extirpating any 
salt-water fish, but he has already exterminated at least one 
marine warm-blooded animal—Steller’s sea cow—and the 
walrus, the sea lion, and other large amphibia, as well as the 
principal fishing quadrupeds, are in imminent danger of ex- 
tinction. Steller’s sea cow, /?hytina Stelleri, was first seen by 
Europeans in the year 1741, on Bering’s Island. It was a 
huge amphibious mammal, weighing not less than eight thou- 
sand pounds, and appears to have been confined exclusively to 
the islands and coasts in the neighborhood of Bering’s Strait. 
Its flesh was very palatable, and the localities it frequented 
were easily accessible from the Russian establishments in 
Kamtschatka. As soon as its existence and character, and the 
* Two young pickerel, Gystes fasciatus, five inches long, ate 128 minnows, 
an inch long, the first day they were fed, 152 the second, and 150 the third. 
—Fifth Report of Commissioners of Massachusetts for Introduction of Fish. 
TST abry 
+ The shark is pursued in all the tropical and subtropical seas for its fins— 
for which there is a great demand in China as an article of diet—its oil and 
other products. About 40,000 are taken annually in the Indian Ocean and the 
contiguous seas. In the North Sea and the Arctic Ocean large numbers are 
annually caught. See MerK, Waarenlexikon—a work of great accuracy and 
value (Leipzig, 1870), article Huifisch. 
