Eugenie Clark

Eugenie Clark (born May 4, 1922, New York, New York, U.S.—died February 25, 2015, Sarasota, Florida) was an American ichthyologist noted for her research on poisonous fishes of the tropical seas and on the behaviour of sharks. She was also an avid marine conservationist.

Clark was born to an American father and a Japanese mother. Her father died when she was young, and she was supported by her mother and grandparents. On days when she accompanied her mother to work in Manhattan, Clark whiled away the hours at the New York Aquarium (then in Battery Park) and soon determined to study fish. She was further inspired by the writings of William Beebe, a pioneer in underwater research. She later studied zoology at Hunter College (B.A., 1942) and New York University (M.A., 1946), supporting herself at the latter school by working as a chemist for a plastics company.

Clark was a research assistant at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, from 1946 to 1947. There she learned to dive with gear that predated the self-contained underwater breathing device developed by the U.S. military and later known as the scuba. (She would later become proficient with scuba gear as well.) In 1947 she was asked by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to study the sea life of the Philippines but was detained by the FBI because of concerns about her Japanese heritage and was ultimately unable to go. She worked at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in 1948. Clark was a member of the staff of the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, from 1948 to 1966. 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 Fulbright scholar (1951), she conducted research on the Red Sea from the Al-Ghardaqah Marine 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 United States to carry out successful artificial insemination experiments on fish.

In 1955—with funding from William H. Vanderbilt, grandson of shipping and railroad magnet Cornelius Vanderbilt—Clark helped found the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory in Placida, Florida; it moved to Siesta Key in 1960 and to Sarasota in 1978. 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; that year it was renamed the Mote Marine Laboratory. The year the lab was built, Clark was asked by a cancer researcher to capture some sharks so he could study their livers; that led to the creation of a pen for live sharks at the site. In 1958 Clark undertook research on shark behaviour, 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. Thereafter Clark, who also encountered sharks in the wild on her frequent dives, became an advocate for their conservation and attempted to dispel the public fear of the animals. She joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in 1968, becoming full professor in 1973 and emeritus in 1992. Clark made frequent expeditions into the field, particularly the Red Sea. She retired from teaching in 1999.

Clark made numerous studies of the fish in the order Tetraodontiformes (Plectognathi), which includes triggerfish, pufferfish, and filefish. She discovered that the Red Sea Moses sole (Pardachirus marmoratus), a type of flatfish, secretes a substance that is repulsive to sharks (1972). In 1973 she visited caves in Mexico where sharks had been reported to lie motionless and seemingly unreactive. She hypothesized that freshwater seeps in the caves helped the fish to shed parasites, an assertion borne out by the presence of parasite-eating remoras in the caves. In 1995 her team discovered that whale sharks give birth to live young. Clark also made numerous studies of the colonial garden eels of the Red Sea and of other fish species.

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 cowrote the children’s book The Desert Beneath the Sea (1991), about her investigations of the sandy floors of the Red Sea.