Birth in a Bat House

"The spitting image of its mother!' crowed famed Herpetologist Raymond Lee Ditmars one day last week.

Dr. Ditmars' trip to Panama last summer had made New York's Bronx Zoo unique throughout the world in the possession of a live vampire bat, a tiny, loathsome, jut-jawed creature which lives on blood sucked from beasts and men (TIME, Oct. 2). Thriving on defibrinated blood obtained fresh daily from an abattoir, the captive has now presented its owners with the first vampire bat ever born in a zoo.*

"The thing is worth its weight in gold," cried Dr. Ditmars, excited over the prospect of adding to the scant store of information about this species' life and habits. "It has a wingspread of four inches, is about the size of a mouse and was active from the moment of birth. It crawls on its mother's back, feeds like a human baby and squeaks like a mouse."

Owl at Sea

Monstrous headseas washed roaring against the S. S. Manhattan off the Grand Banks, one evening last week. Overhead howled an 85-mi. nor'wester. Only three passengers were hardy enough to be aboveboard. One was Queena Mario, small, vivacious soprano of the Metropolitan Opera Company. Another was her pet marmoset, Vibrato. The third was a Mrs. Florence Garson of Staten Island, N. Y.

None of them saw or heard a bedraggled bundle of feathers whisk out of the lowering sky, plop softly on the Manhattan's sun deck. Soprano Mario, striding briskly, stumbled over it. Mrs. Garson hurried up, agreed that it looked like a mop. To Vibrato it looked like a warm hideaway. He hopped out of his mistress' muff, tried to bury himself in its folds. Only then did the two women discover that the "mop" was an exhausted owl.

They named the owl Manhattan, put it in Vibrato's cage for company. When the ship docked in New York last week both of them wanted to keep it. The ship's captain, called to arbitrate, tossed a shilling, sent the bird to Staten Island. Ornithologists identified the bird, which the ship's crew had called an "ice owl," as an American hawk owl, a dark, small-eyed, falcon-like creature slightly smaller than a crow, which breeds in the Arctic, sometimes winters as far south as the U. S., never goes to sea if it can help it.

Shark! Shark!

Pantophagous is the shark. Its stomach is the ocean's garbage can. Its digestive fluid, dropped on a man's hand, will take off the skin. In over 30 years of shark-hunting off Hawaii, the U. S., Africa, the West Indies, Australia, Captain William E. ("Sharky Bill") Young has learned not to be surprised at anything he finds when he rips open a shark's belly. He has discovered tin cans, horses' hoofs, a small pig, bottles, parts of other sharks. Once, in a shark caught off Big Pine Key, Fla., he found a man's arm, six pieces of human flesh and a square of cloth from a blue serge coat.

Next day he heard about the wreck of an airplane off Havana in which one Edwin F. Atkins Jr., a U. S. planter in Cuba, had been lost. Friends of the planter identified the shark's meal. For years thereafter whenever a person asked him the old question, "Will sharks eat human beings?" Sharkman Young produced a photograph of his partner standing in front of the disemboweled shark, holding the Atkins human arm. Last fortnight that sickening picture, with many another, was reproduced in Sharkman Young's garrulous, rambling fisherman's book Shark! Shark!, set down for him by Horace S. Mazet*

On the question of whether sharks will attack living human beings, Sharkman Young is less convincing. He has never seen it happen. But he has heard enough well-authenticated stories, some of them backed up by photographs in his book, to be himself convinced. Reassuring is the fact that out of several hundred varieties of shark, only about seven have either the disposition or dental equipment to be man-eaters. They are the Blue, Great White, Tiger, Hammerhead, Brown, Australian Whaler and Gray Nurse sharks. Even these are not likely to attack unless maddened by the smell of blood or fresh meat in the water. Most sharks are cowards, easily frightened off by a little hand-waving or water-splashing.

Sharkman Young confirms cinemagoers' suspicions that it would be almost impossible for a swimmer armed only with a knife to kill a shark. The shark, which swims 40 to 50 m.p.h., would probably be off like a streak if he saw a man diving toward him. Even if the man got close, it would take a powerful and lucky thrust to penetrate the shark's tough hide and cartilage, pierce its two-inch heart.

Shark-hunters have no luck with guns or dynamite. A dead shark sinks at once. In his Hawaiian days Sharkman Young used to rip open a dead horse, trail it behind his boat, harpoon the sharks as they swarmed to tear at the flesh. When he went into shark-hunting on a commercial scale, Sharkman Young strung 600-ft. nets along the ocean floor. A shark never turns back. Stopped by a net, it rolls over & over until it is hopelessly entangled. After chemists learned some 15 years ago how to remove the prickly, flint-like denticle from a shark's tough hide, the shark leather industry began to grow. Sharkman Young has spent most of his time since then supplying raw material. With millions of sharks to be had for the taking, he thinks the shark business has a big future. Shark oil is used for tanning, steel-tempering, paint-making. Tons of shark meat, which tastes something like lobster, are sold daily throughout the world, usually under the name of "rock salmon" or "grayfish." Ground-up shark carcass makes good poultry feed or fertilizer. Chinese snap up shark fins for making soup.

* Last captive birth was in Panama's Gorgas Memorial Laboratory (Medical Research) last year.

* Golham House ($4); half-bound in shark leather.

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