The Shark Lady and the Lab on City Island

In nineteen fifty-five, a young ichthyologist named Eugenie Clark founded a small marine research station on the Florida Gulf Coast near Placida and called it the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory. Her benefactors were the Vanderbilt family, who wanted a serious place to study what was living in the waters around them. Clark was already known for her fieldwork in the Red Sea and Pacific, and she had a specific obsession: sharks.

At the time, sharks were understood almost entirely as killing machines. Clark set out to study what they actually were. Working at Cape Haze, she became the first scientist to train sharks to press targets to receive a food reward, demonstrating that animals assumed to be incapable of learning were in fact highly trainable. She discovered that certain shark species do not need to swim continuously to breathe, a finding that overturned decades of received wisdom. Her research on sleeping sharks off the coast of Mexico would later become one of the most cited papers in shark biology.

The laboratory relocated to Sarasota in nineteen sixty, was renamed Mote Marine Laboratory in nineteen sixty-seven in honor of the Mote family, and settled on City Island in Sarasota Bay in nineteen seventy-eight. The aquarium opened to the public in nineteen eighty, giving Sarasota residents direct access to the research happening in their bay. Mote's current programs include manatee behavior and population demographics, dolphin research, coral disease, and red tide treatment, including field trials of compounds that reduce the algae responsible for red tide by more than seventy percent in lab and field trials.

Clark published two books, Lady with a Spear and The Lady and the Sharks, and authored more than one hundred seventy-five scientific papers. She died in two thousand fifteen at the age of ninety-two, still diving, still publishing. The Shark Lady built one of the most productive independent marine laboratories in the Western Hemisphere on a bay most people thought of only as a place to sail.