Bay Soundings l Mote's Founding Director Celebrates Her 85th Birthday

Mote's Founding Director Celebrates Her 85th Birthday

When Dr. Eugenie Clark observed her 85th birthday on May 4, she had much to celebrate. Over the last 50 years, a tiny marine research station that began as a Vanderbilt family vision, and where she began much of her groundbreaking work, has become one of the largest independent marine research organizations in the world. Today, Mote Marine Laboratory stands as a great legacy to its namesake, William R. Mote, and its founding director who continues to contribute to Mote as a trustee emerita and eminent scientist.

As a student, Clark was told there was no point in continuing her education because it would be wasted when she got married and had children. She proved the professor wrong with a landmark career spanning more than 50 years, even as she raised four children.

Clark – or Genie as almost everyone calls her — arrived at Cape Haze on Vanderbilt land near Boca Grande in January 1955 and went to work in a 12-foot-by-20-foot building with a dock and a 21-foot Chris Craft, Dancer, named after Alfred G. Vanderbilt’s favorite race horse. With the help of local fisherman, the fledgling lab caught its first sharks on Jan. 26. Specimen jars were scavenged from the defunct Bass Biological Station, and the locals started stopping by to see what was up at the Cape Haze Marine Lab’s shark pen. The lab incorporated on June 13, 1955.

By that time, Clark was already a well-recognized researcher and communicator. She had written Lady with a Spear in 1953 (selected as a Book of the Month and translated into eight languages) documenting her travels across the South Pacific and Red Sea collecting fish and watching sharks. She had earned her Ph.D. from New York University after a stint at Woods Hole Marine Biological Station and worked for several major research facilities, including Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the American Museum of National History.

As founding director, Clark built an organization that earned National Science Foundation funding for half the cost of a new building because the agency admired its publication record after just five years.

Fortuitously, the Mote family – William, his wife Lenore and his sister Betty Mote Rose – arrived in 1967 to replace the Vanderbilts as the lab’s primary financial sponsors. That year, Perry W. Gilbert also assumed the mantle of director. Bill Mote’s considerable business acumen and boundless energy transformed the lab in size, while Gilbert reorganized to pursue research in biomedicine, microbiology, neurobiology and behavior, ecology, and environmental health, even as it focused on the shark studies Clark had started.

Along with hundreds of published articles, Clark has been involved with 25 television documentaries filmed in the US, Australia, England, Egypt, Israel, Japan and Mexico. A 1982 National Geographic special on sharks still holds Neilsen’s highest rating for PBS.

Although Dr. Eugenie Clark is known around the world as “Shark Lady” for her groundbreaking work on sharks, the four fish named for her all belong to other species.

• Atrobucca geniae Ben-Tuvia and Trewavas - Family Scienidae
• Callogobius clarki (Goren) - Family Gobiidae
• Enneapterygius clarkae Holleman - Family Tripterygiidae
• Sticharium clarkae George and Springer - Family Clinidae

Over the next 40 years, Clark continued to explore the undersea world around the world. She was the principal investigator of 51 grants and contracts for study of behavior and ecology of fishes and conducted 71 submersible dives as deep as 12,000 feet. She led more than 200 diving research expeditions to the Red Sea, Caribbean, Mexico, Japan, Papua New Guinea, Solomons, Thailand and Borneo, to study sand fishes, whale sharks and deep sea sharks.

“I never consciously wanted to be an explorer,” she said. “I just knew I wanted to study fish.”

Communicating that knowledge with other scientists, students and the general public also has been a lodestone throughout her career. She has published more than 170 articles in popular magazines, including National Geographic, International Wildlife, Natural History and National Parks as well as scientific journals such as Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History and Environmental Biology of Fishes.

She joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in 1968 and is still a professor emerita there, and has lectured at more 70 American and 21 overseas colleges or universities.

The curiosity that started in a Manhattan aquarium and took her all over the world is still alive and well. She’s spent recent years in Sarasota at the lab she helped to create. Today, she observes the convict fish — a little-known species that lives their entire life hiding in coral tunnels and may be the only vertebrate animal where babies feed their parents — from her office at Mote Marine Laboratory. Visitors to Mote Aquarium can also see the unique fish at a recently updated exhibit highlighting Clark’s studies.

Her birthday party at Mote also celebrates the world-class organization she helped to found. Instead of a tiny building and help from local fishermen, Mote now has a staff of 240, including 40 Ph.D. scientists, organized into seven research centers and field stations that encompass a 200-acre aquaculture park and separate operations on Pine Island and Summerland Key. The lab also has over 10,000 individual and corporate members, and some 400,000 people visit Mote Aquarium each year. Volunteers, so much the lifeblood of the aquarium and laboratory, now number 1,500.

That community involvement is critical, she adds. “I guess that I’m very proud that Mote is more than just an isolated lab where people study fish, it’s a place where people come and learn about fish, visit the aquarium or hear our scientists lecture.”

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