The Lady and the Sharks

by Eugenie Clark

The author of this book was a famed marine biologist who began her career simply because she was so passionate about diving and interested in fishes. In the 1950's she was invited to set up and run a marine laboratory on the coast of Florida, now the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium. It started out as just a small dock and one building where she and a few colleagues would collect, identify and study specimens they collected of various marine life. She was known for spearing fish but obtained many specimens by offering to take the bycatch or "trash fish" off the hands of fishermen in nearby waters. One chapter delightfully explains how she learned to catch small territorial fishes in a glass jar. She would dive down to the area where the fish lived, and gently chase them to study their habitual routes through the territory, and what corners they would dart around to hide when pressed. Then situate a jar around a hidden corner of the usual escape path, and later return to follow the fish until it naturally swam around the corner into its hideyhole- which was now a glass prison.

There are many pages describing dissections and what they learned from the anatomy or stomach contents of fish, particularly sharks which were her speciality. But they also caught fish alive and studied their behavior in aquariums, made films underwater and most famously, build a pen on the shore where they kept sharks. At first just intending to solve some mysteries about basic shark biology- they had rarely been seen to mate, for example, and nobody knew what these structures called abdominal pores were for. Then Eugenie was curious to find out if a shark could learn. So she set up experiments to test their ability to press a target and ring a bell to get a food reward, and to distinguish between targets of different shapes, patterns and colors. Reading about the experiments was my favorite part. A female shark gave birth in the pen, and they promptly began behavioral studies on the pups. They found that a young nurse shark could learn as quickly as a typical mouse in a lab!

A lot of the book is about the work it took to set up the laboratory, difficulties in keeping tresspassers who wanted to show off to their friends from harming her live sharks, how her young children were involved at the lab (she thought all children should show a healthy curiosity in watching a parent clean fish or a whole chicken for dinner, and get a natural lesson in anatomy!), her work involving and educating the public, and many interesting discoveries in the field of ichthyology. I liked reading about the gobies, garden eels, manta rays, hermaphroditic serranus fish and others just as much as the sharks. There are many written descriptions of diving experiences- her favorite activity. One very curious chapter describes a dive into deep sinkholes in the Salt Springs and Warm Springs of Florida- where she and some other divers discovered human remains. Their most spectacular find was a skull that appeared to contain mineralized brain tissue estimated to be 10,000 years old. Eugenie reports that they attempted many times to convince archaeologists to come study the site, but their claim to have found a fossilized brain was scoffed at and their announcements of the find were ridiculed and ignored. Now the site is considered an important site and under study! I found a few articles about it online, including one here and here- the William Royal mentioned in the second article is the man Bill Royal whom Eugenie dove with. Of course she herself is not mentioned in these articles. Reading her vivid description of what it was like to dive in that sinkhole is particularly eerie- especially when she writes about experiencing nitrogen narcosis, which sounds incredibly frightening.

Needless to say, I want to get hold of her earlier memoir, Lady with a Spear- it's sad my public library only has books about Eugenie Clark, not a single one by her!

Rating: 4/5            269 pages, 1969