Eugenie clark career
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Smithsonian Ocean
Eugenie Clark grew up spending her weekends at the aquarium. Her father died when she was two, so her mother had to get creative with babysitting. When Clark was around nine years old, her mother would drop her off at the New York Aquarium before heading to work at a newspaper stand. Wandering around the old aquarium, Clark developed a love for all things ocean and wished that she could swim with the sharks in the glass tanks.
As an adult, she brought this dream to life and conducted 72 submersible dives and countless more using Scuba gear, where she studied marine life, including sharks. She was one of the only ichthyologists, or fish biologists, of her time to study living specimens in this way.
While diving, Clark studied animal behavior and visited places very few people had explored, such as the Red Sea. There she discovered several fish species, including one that releases a natural shark repellant when threatened. Known as the Moses sole, the fish makes hungry sharks not only stop in their tracks, but then proceed to thrash their heads from Few women, let alone those of Japanese American descent, were working in the male-dominated field of marine biology shortly after World War II. Dr. Eugenie Clark changed all that. A scientific pioneer who greatly contributed to people’s knowledge of sharks and other fish, Clark worked to improve sharks’ reputation in the public eye. Perhaps more importantly, she challenged the stereotypes surrounding women in science by proving that women had much to contribute to the scientific community. Working to pay her way through Hunter College in the early 1940s, Clark studied ichthyology, the branch of biology devoted to the study of fish. Following graduate research in the South Pacific, she took a job at the Scripps Instituti You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience. Dr. Eugenie Clark — nicknamed “The Shark Lady” — was a world authority on sharks and fish who built Mote Marine Laboratory in 1955. The Lab, then called the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory, was created and supported by the Vanderbilt family as a place to study the oceans and share that information with the world. (See Remembering Mote’s “Shark Lady”: The Life and Legacy of Dr. Eugenie Clark.) Genie’s one-woman operation eventually grew into a full-fledged research laboratory with twenty-five diverse research programs, a formal education division and the public Mote Aquarium. She was a research assistant at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the New York Zoological Society, and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Dr. Clark was the recipient of three honorary D.Sc. degrees and awards from the National Geographic Society, the Explorers Club, the Underwater Society of America, the American Littoral Society, the Gold Med
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Dr. Eugenie Clark (1922-2015)
Early Life and Education
Born in New York City on May 4, 1922, Clark learned to swim before the age of two. She often credited her childhood visits to the New York Aquarium as fostering her passion for the aquatic world, together with her Japanese heritage and the central role of the sea in Japanese culture. •
Biography: