How Japanese-American Scientist Eugenie Clark Spearheaded the Study of Sharks

The first shark we catch this morning in Terra Ceia Bay is a very angry, very pregnant bull shark. She whips her tail with amazing force, desperately trying to propel herself out of our grip. I cannot get hold of her tail, and we struggle to pull her into position along the side of the boat. She’s girthy—just from looking at her we can see she’s carrying pups. With one big, massive jerk, she straightens the big ol’ hook and releases herself. In a flash, she is back in the water, gliding away from us.

I lean against the edge of Tonya’s boat, the Disconnected, speechless. This bull shark’s relentless intensity is not normal.

“Looks like she had other ideas,” I say. I’m impressed. #Respect.

“Bet she’s off to drop those pups right now,” Tonya says.

Tonya is my main fishing partner, and her whole vibe is bad*ss. She’s the head of the Smalltooth Sawfish Recovery Implementation Team, a group that has been tasked with stewarding the conservation efforts of sawfish in the United States ever since they became listed under the Endangered Species Act in 2003, and she runs Havenworth Coastal Conservation, her own nonprofit, which conducts research as well as doing a lot of outreach and science education to promote conservation efforts.

Tonya grew up in Grand Haven, Michigan, and Fort Worth, Texas, which is a long way from any salt water—but, like me, she used to go on family vacations to the beach. That’s where she fell in love with the ocean, fishing with her dad. When she was about seven years old, she caught her first blacktip, and after that, all she wanted was to be out on the water—or swimming or snorkeling through it. In high school, she wrote reports on the Gulf of Mexico and the marine life there. She read books, watched documentaries, essentially educated herself in everything to do with marine life.

After joining the navy, she earned a degree in marine fisheries from Texas A&M. Tonya’s someone who never went to graduate school, but she knows her intelligence, she believes in her drive and ability to make significant contributions, and so, without the classic scientist pedigree, she’s made a career for herself, rejecting other people’s low expectations of her as someone from small towns and without much money, an advanced degree, or (let’s be honest) a penis.

For me, Tonya is the original rogue scientist. The first time I met her I was in graduate school, doing a sawfish survey in the Everglades. Afterward, we were sitting in the back of a pickup truck heading home for the day, talking loudly over the wind, and I blurted out, “I want to be like you—please let me be your mini-me!” She laughed, and the rest is history. When I left graduate school a couple of years later, not knowing what was next for me, just positive I needed to get out of the toxic academic environment, the one thing I was sure of was that I was going to Tampa Bay, where Tonya was. This lady has shark energy—she’s not going to mess with you, but she will bite if necessary

Today, out on the boat, we’re hosting four early-career MISS folks: Jahnita, Jade, Karson, and Naomi—our Eugenie Clark fellows. This is a new fellowship that we named after the one and only Dr. Eugenie Clark, otherwise known as the Shark Lady, a total rebel and one of the very first shark researchers. Genie, as she was known, died in 2015, and in my view, she should be a household name by now—but of course, because she was a woman, and a woman of Japanese descent, most people haven’t heard about her or her legacy.

She was born in New York City in 1922 and spent her childhood visiting the aquarium, where she totally fell in love with underwater life. Little Genie used to hang out at the aquarium listening to the docents give tours until she knew the information by heart. She began giving unofficial tours of her own—and eventually, the aquarium had to hire her as a docent because her tours were so good. In 1942, she managed to obtain a BA in zoology from Hunter College, at a time when a woman entering marine sciences was pretty much unheard of. When she went to do graduate work at Columbia University, however, her application was rejected because the university was worried that she would give up her studies as soon as she had children. Undeterred, she went on to get a master’s and a doctorate at NYU.

Before Genie came along, scientists hadn’t really been researching sharks or shark behavior. People just assumed that sharks were mindless, that they couldn’t learn and didn’t have memory recall, but Genie proved that was false. To this day, aquariums use Genie’s theories around target training, where sharks learn to come and eat at a specific target. One of Genie’s greatest legacies is that she founded the lab that grew into the Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium, the marine research organization currently located in Sarasota, Florida, where I got my first big-girl job. When she founded Mote, Genie made sure the lab had an aquarium attached, so that young people could be introduced to a love of marine science the same way she was.

The first time I heard Genie’s name, I was an undergrad, and just knowing that a woman was highly regarded in the field of shark science—was in fact one of the founders of shark science and of the American Elasmobranch Society—was very empowering for me as a woman in a male-dominated field. I didn’t know that she was a person of color, though, until 2019, when a biography came out about her and I found out that she was Japanese American. Genie was white-passing, so when I looked at pictures of her, it hadn’t been obvious to me. I found it interesting that people didn’t talk about that aspect of her life—maybe because people who aren’t people of color don’t think it’s an important fact.

When I really got to know more about Genie, though, was during conversations with Tonya, because Tonya had known her and worked with her at Mote. Over the years, Tonya had had many candid conversations with Genie about being a woman in science, and Tonya has passed on a lot of that to me. By Tonya’s account, Genie was a force to be reckoned with scientifically and in the way she stuck to her guns and took up space in shark science. A piece of advice she gave Tonya when Tonya was dealing with a lot of sexism in the field was to “succeed in spite of them.” I love that. That’s what I aim to do. I actually think spite is a good motivation, and it’s a valid one. I want to prove wrong all of the people who told me that I couldn’t succeed.

In keeping with Genie’s ethos and life’s work, the MISS Eugenie Clark fellowship offers female-identifying students and students of color interested in marine science a full-time, paid summer internship. The program provides research experience, as well as outreach and education experience, since the recipients help us with MISS summer camp and Science at the Sea, two free MISS programs for kids. It’s not a coincidence that wealth and access to resources fall along race lines in this country—it’s by design, and so we have to design our programs to fill that financial gap.

Standing on deck, watching the bull shark swim off, S-curving her way as far from us as she can, my heart is pumping faster than it has in a long time. The power in that shark was amazing.

“That was fun!” I say.

“Whoa… you guys really tussled there,” Jahnita responds, her eyes wide, taking it all in.

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Excerpted from Sharks Don’t Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist by Jasmin Graham. Copyright © 2024 by Jasmin Graham. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.