The Bingham Oceanographic Laboratory recently received a fine specimen of the common thresher shark, Alopias vulpinus (Bonnaterre) through the courtesy of Mr. S. Doane of Speed\u27s Bait Shop in Niantic, Connecticut…

Morrow, James E.

English

Yale University

POSTILLA   Published from 1950 to 2004, the short papers of the Postilla series reported on original research by the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History’s curators, staff, and research associates, and their colleagues, in the natural science disciplines represented by the collections of the Museum’s curatorial divisions.  The Postilla series, which ceased publication with Number 232 (2004), was incorporated into the journal Bulletin of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, available from BioOne Complete at https://bioone.org/.  Yale Peabody Museum scholarly publications are archived through EliScholar,  a digital platform for scholarly publishing provided by Yale University Library at https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/.                   This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/     P.O. Box 208118 | New Haven CT 06520-8118 USA | peabody.yale.edu YALE PEABODY MUSEUM OP NATURAL HISTORY Number 24 December 5, 1955 New Haven, Conn. A THRESHER SHARK FROM LONG ISLAND SOUND JAMES E. MORROW* The Bingham Oceanographic Laboratory recently received a fine specimen of the common thresher shark, Alopias vwl-pinus (Bonnaterre) through the courtesy of Mr. S. Doane of Speed's Bait Shop in Niantic, Connecticut. Mr. Doane called us to identify a "strange shark" brought in by a sport fisherman. The fish had been foul hooked in the tail while the angler was trolling a blue mullet plug for bluefish, and had required about twenty minutes to bring to the boat. The locality of capture was stated to have been "between Plum Island and the Bloody Ground." This would be roughly five to six miles due south of Niantic. The specimen, a juvenile female weighing 43 pounds, is now in the Bingham Oceanographic Collection of Peabody Museum. Measured parallel to the mid-line, the length of the body from the tip of the snout to the anterior edge of the pre-caudal notch was 957 mm. The total length, with the tail laid out in a more or less natural position (Fig. 1) , was 1982 mm, or 6 feet 6 inches. The greatest depth of the body was 204 mm. Bigelow and Schroeder (Fishes of the Western North Altantic, * Bingham Oceanographic Laboratory Pt . 1, pg. 171, 1948) give information suggesting that young threshers are between three and five feet long at birth. Al-though nothing is known of the rate of growth of this fish, nevertheless it would appear that the present specimen was quite young, possibly only a few months old. The particular interest of this specimen lies in the locality of its capture. I t seems probable that thresher sharks must occasionally occur in Long Island Sound, if only for the reason tha t they are quite abundant in nearby waters and would be expected to enter the sound from time to time purely on the basis of random wanderings. However, Bigelow and Schroeder (op. cit., pg. 174) state that there is only one previous record of the thresher shark from Connecticut. This is the report by Linsley (Amer. Jour. Sci., Jf7': 76, 1844), who recorded a specimen from Stonington, albeit with a question mark. Our specimen, then, would seem to be the only one which can defi-nitely be ascribed to Long Island Sound. Why the thresher shark, so abundant in outside waters of New England, should be so rare in Long Island Sound, is not a t all clear. Perhaps the most logical suggestion is that the lower salinity of the sound is not suitable for these animals. Riley (Bull. Bingham Oceanogr. Coll., IS (3) : 5-39, 1952) has shown the salinity gradient between Block Island Sound and the eastern end of Long Island Sound to be of the order of 1.5 °/oo in a distance of only a few miles. I t may be that this salinity gradient is sharp enough to act as a barrier to their entrance. However, lacking definitive knowledge of the salinity tolerance of the thresher shark, this must remain merely a suggestion. --••• • •v." • ^'^M^'^^m^^^ awMWRfc raw 

A thresher shark from Long Island Sound

https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=peabody_museum_natural_history_postilla

A thresher shark from Long Island Sound

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