VERY LIKE A WHALE.

Taranaki Daily News, 1 November 1919, Page 11

VERY LIKE A WHALE.

What is claimed to be the world's largest fish is exciting interest in America. Tt measures 43 feet in length, ftnd weighs 15 tons. When caught it contained an octopus weighing 4001b, a black-fish weighing 1.5001b, and 5001b weight of coral. Before it was killed it smashed a boat into splinters, and crushed the rudder and propeller of a 31-ton yacht with a single swish of its tail.

The monster was harpooned by Captain C. H. Thompson while seeking big game fish off Florida Key, in the Caribbean Sea. He says that after driving five harpoons into the hod\ v of the fish it towed the small lifeboat from which he and others were fishing for two davs. Numerous rifle shots failed to check the fish, which was not killed until it became stranded in shallow water,. Professor J. S. Warmbeth, a taxidermist of the Smithsonian Institute at Washington, superintended the work of preserving the fish. The skin is 3in. thick and without scale, and it is described in American- as having ft mouth SOin'. wide and 54<in. deep, situated at the end of the snout. It resembles a cat-fish more than anythin" else. Inside the month a tongue Sift long, and n_ gullet larse enough to swallow an octopus weighing 4001b. There are no ribs, and in place of a backbone its spinal column consists of cartilasinous vertebrae, some of which are S'/.in. wide. Although claimed to be the largest fish ever captured, naturalists say that it was onlv a baby of its tribe, and that if it had lived to attain full growth it would have been two and a-half times as lartre. In their opinion it has none of the features of a whale, but to what genus of fish it belongs they cannot say. The theory is nut forward that the creature was blown up from the depths by some submarine disturbance, which injured its diving apparatus, and that it was unable to return to its native haunts.