Eugenie Clark
Eugenie Clark was born on May 4th, 1922, New York, U.S. She was an American ichthyologist, who was noted for her research on poisonous fishes of the tropical seas and on the behaviour of sharks. Clark was also an avid marine conservationist.
She was born to an American father and a Japanese mother. Her father died when she was two, so her mother had to get creative with babysitting. When Eugenie Clar was around nine years old, her mother would drop her off at the New York Aquarium (then in Battery Park).
Wandering around the old aquarium, Clark developed a love for all things oceanwise and wished that she could swim with the sharks in the glass takes.
Later at Hunter College (B.A., 1942) and New York University (M.A., 1946), she studied zoology. She supported herself at the latter school by working as a chemist for a plastics company.
As an adult, she brought her dreams to life.
Eugenie Clark was a research assistant at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, from 1946 to 1947. There she learned how to dive with gear that predated the self-contained underwater breathing device developed by the U.S military and later known as scuba gear. (She would become proficient with scuba gear as well.) Conducting around 72 submersible dives and countless more with gear. She was one of the only ichthyologists or fish biologists of her time to study living specimens in this way.
In 1947, she was asked by the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service to study the sea life of the Philippines, however due to her Japanese heritage she was detained by the FBI due to their concerns, and was ultimately unable to go.
She worked at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in 1948. Eugenie Clark was a member of the staff of the American Museum of Natural History, New York City from 1948 to 1949.
In 1949 the U.S. Office of Naval Research sent her to the islands of the South Seas to collect and identify species of poisonous fish; there she learned to free dive.
As a Fullbright scholar in 1951, she conducted research on the Red Sea from the Al-Ghardaqah Narine Biological Station in Egypt. At the time, the waters were virtually unexplored. Her research on the live-bearing reproduction of platy and swordtail fish earned her a doctorate from New York University in 1950. She was reported as being the first person in the U.S. to carry out successful artificial insemination experiments on fish.
Her talks about her experiences in the Red Sea fascinated audiences of all ages. People flooded conference rooms to hear her tales of the strange creatures she encountered.
Clark wrote a book about her time in the Red Sea, called “Lady with a Spear” (1953). This book inspired philanthropists Anne and William Vanderbilt to fund a small laboratory in Florida where Clark could conduct research. In 1960 it was moved to Siesta Key and then in 1978 to Sarasota. Eugenie Clark and her growing team of researchers collected and studied hundreds of fish species off the Florida coast. She served as its executive director until 1967, to which it was then renamed the Mote Marine Laboratory.
The year that the lab was built, Eugenie Clark was asked by a cancer researcher to capture some sharks so he could study their livers; this led to the creation of a pen for live sharks at the site. In 1958, Eugenie Clark undertook research on shark behaviors, eventually training lemon sharks (and other species) to push a target in order to receive food.
That research contradicted long-held assumptions that sharks lacked intelligence. After her studies Eugenie Clark became an advocate for their conservation and attempted to dispel the public fear of the animals. She gave lectures to the public, taught at the University of Maryland (1968) becoming a full time professor in 1973 and emeritus in 1992.
She even rode on the back of a 50-foot whale shark!
Eugenie Clark made numerous studies of the fish in the order Tetraodontiforms (Plectognathi), which includes triggerfish, pufferfish, and filefish. Including one that releases a natural shark repellant when threatened, known as Moses sole (Pardachrius marmoratus), the fish makes hungry sharks not only stop in their tracks but then proceed to thrash their heads from side to side. She studied potential human uses for the repellant, but found that it would not be effective long enough to be useful in products.
Eugenie Clark was a frequent contributor to National Geographic Magazine. She wrote the memoirs Lady with a Spear (1953) and The Lady and the Sharks (1969), and co-wrote the children’s book The Desert Beneath the Sea (1991), about her investigations of the sandy floors of the Red Sea.
Even as she aged she didn’t slow down, at 92 years old she completed her last dive. Just a year before she died on February 15, 2015 in Sarasota, Florida.
