I am taking the liberty of writing a diary on a female scientist whom I never met and who died in the 21st Century (in fact this very year.) This is in large part because of her 1951 book "Lady With a Spear." which I read several times over when I was a teenager and which, if I had not lived in the Sonoran Desert, would probably have turned me into a marine biologist. In fact I had never even seen the sea and did not until a friend drove me to San Felipe, Baja California, which (after being lost on the Colorado River delta for hours) we reached just at sundown, giving me only a few minutes to turn rocks and marvel over the porcelain crabs and other sea life that I found.
Clark was born in New York City of a Japanese mother and an American father, the latter dying before she was two. Involved deeply in the Japanese community of New York City, Clark and her family avoided the internment of Japanese-Americans on the West coast during World War II. Instead, she became interested in fish, in large part encouraged by her mother, and eventually got her B.A. in zoology at Hunter in 1942, followed by a M.A. and Ph.D. at New York University. Her dissertation work was finished after the war, under the direction of Carl Hubbs of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, graduating in 1950.
She published not only "Lady with a Spear," but another book titled "The Lady and the Sharks" (1968) and was founding director of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory, now known as the Mote Marine Laboratory, in Sarasota, Florida. She was given many awards during her lifetime, including 3 honorary D.Sc. degrees. For much of her professional life she was a professor, research scientist or emerita at the University of Maryland at College Park. She had several species of fish named after her and finally died in Sarasota at the age of 92! She was only "bitten" once by a shark- the jaws of a very dead tiger shark nailed her at an abrupt traffic stop!
Clark lived a long and productive life, studying all aspects of fish behavior and physiology, especially of sharks. She was one of the marine biologists, along with William Beebe, Rachel Carson, Sylvia Alice Earle, Archie Carr, Carl Safina, and others, who have described the remarkable and mind-bogglingly huge ecosystems in the sea and have made us aware of their complexity and fragility.
Clark told her story in a manner that infected me with a love of something that as of my reading I had never seen. My one rather tenuous connection, other than reading her books and once visiting the Scripps Institute during a meeting at San Diego, was the fact that my wife met Carl Hubbs when she was a little kid, and may have met Clark as well. Of course she had no interest in the meeting of the "Ichts and Herps" society with which her mother and father were involved.
Though I never met Clark, her story of growing up fascinated with fish touched me and I thought for a little while I might change my major interest in insects and spiders and study fish. I kept a small aquarium and poured over books on tropical freshwater and saltwater fish. However my family was poor and I, at the time, had no chance of even going to college, something that altered in a manner that I have described in another diary.
The main point I want to make is that Eugenie Clark was an anomaly at the time. Only a few women went to the meetings of the Ichthyologists and Herpetologists society - Doris Cochran being one exception perhaps (I've written about her in another diary), as well as my mother-in-law - and Eugenie thus stuck out in a nearly all male crowd. That she successfully navigated those waters speaks highly of her abilities, both as a scientist and as an person of strength.
Reference:
Eugenie Clark, Ph.D. (1922-2015) http://msa.maryland.gov/...
Eugenie Clark, The Shark Lady. http://www.sharksider.com/...
"Shark Lady" Eugenie Clark, famed marine biologist, has died. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...
Eugenie Clark http://en.wikipedia.org/...