WILDLIFE Matthews commented: ‘It was an enormous
help to us to be able to use the machinery Gavin had installed for cutting up the sharks, because these creatures were not easy things to dissect – some of the organs were so big and heavy we could barely handle them, and if your scalpel slipped and you punctured the stomach, you could release half a ton of semi- digested plankton all over your dissection.’ Sharks were fished in Scotland until 1994,
‘As the shark slipped silently beneath the boat, we reckoned it was almost 30ft long’
Above: Divers watch as Cetorhinus maximus swims by. Right: With its jaws agape, the shark can filter over 300,000 gallons of seawater an hour. Below right: An illustration from 1868, showing a landed basking shark.
something that is still a serious threat to them today. The Statistical Account of 1790 reports the following from Loch Fyne: ‘This sluggish fish sometimes swims into the salmon nets, and suffers itself to be drawn towards the shore without any resistance, till it gets near the land that for want of a sufficient body of water, it cannot exert its strength, in disentangling itself from the net. The fishers in the mean time take advantage of the situation and attack it with sticks and stones till they have it secure.’ Doubtlessly this would have been an easier
method of catching a shark. Small boats were badly equipped and the hunters were often injured as thrashing, wounded sharks battled for their lives. Harpoons were cruel and ineffectual, and prolonged death. Shark fisheries came and went on a small scale from the Sea of the Hebrides to the Firth of Clyde. The first fishery survived until the 1830s, and then there was a lull in shark hunting. Anthony Watkins largely pioneered a modern
basking shark fishery in Scotland, but Gavin Maxwell and Tex Geddes also set up the Isle of Soay Shark Fishery in 1944, hoping to provide enough income for themselves as well as work for the island community. Maxwell had the enthusiasm, but his experience was woefully lacking. The venture was a fiasco fraught with failed equipment, breakdowns and weather- induced catastrophe. The final blow came when they discovered their hard-won shark livers had become flyblown in storage, rendering them unfit for sale. Maxwell lost heart; in any case he had begun to doubt the ethics of the pursuit. The best outcome of his fishery was his link-
up with two eminent zoologists, L Harrison Matthews and WW Parker, whom he had met while lecturing at the Linnean Society in London. He agreed that they could visit Soay to carry out valuable research on shark carcasses.
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when nine were taken by the last sharker, Howard McCrindle, who has since been work- ing with researchers to protect sharks. Finally, in 1998, the basking shark received full legal protection under the Wildlife and Countryside Act. When out of UK waters, it is still sought, its massive body discarded, its fins used to make soup for the East Asian market. Here, marine tourism remains a worrying threat – jet skis and speedboats can inflict fatal injuries to the sharks. An important marine code of conduct is now in force to protect them. Basking sharks appeared frequently off
Ardnamurchan when I was a child – some summers they were so abundant in the Sound of Mull, off Coll and Tiree and around the Small Isles, that when we fished for mackerel in a small boat we frequently puttered along close beside them. Sometimes there was just one; on other occasions, many. They swam with their cavernous mouths agape. We watched as they soundlessly filtered vast amounts of seawater (up to 330,000 gallons an hour), filling their stomachs with a rich broth of plankton and minute marine life. In the past decade, some of my best sightings
have been around the Sound of Canna, and off Coll, areas of rich planktonic bloom. One morning, rising early on the boat I was crewing, there was an impressive shark close into the pier. The same day we came across a notably large shark off Ardnamurchan Point. As it slipped silently beneath the boat, we estimated it to be almost 30ft (9m) long. The following year, sightings were scant. There have been few serious incidents as a
result of direct contact with basking sharks. The best documented was the tragedy that occurred off Carradale in the Mull of Kintyre in 1937. Three people in a small boat lost their lives when a shark struck the boat and caused them to fall into the sea. This incident was followed by an anti-shark
campaign. Many basking sharks had been seen in the Firth of Clyde that summer; when other boats’ skippers claimed to have been attacked by a vast rogue shark, chasing after them, it blew the initial incident out of all proportion and led to further unsubstantiated stories of ‘shark attacks’. But these are slow-moving
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