This week’s Strong Girl Saturday is Dr. Eugenie Clark, a.k.a. The Shark Lady.
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- Portrait of a young Eugenie Clark
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- Portrait of Eugenie later on in her career
In a time when scuba diving was a relatively new sport, and long before the beloved “Shark Week” aired on Discovery Channel, Eugenie Clark was swimming with sharks and teaching the world that they are not the “gangsters of the sea” that everyone said they were.
Clark collecting specimens in early scuba gear
Clark’s career began just after World War II. Very few women, especially women of Japanese-American descent, were making strides in the male-dominated scientific community at the time, but that didn’t stop Eugenie Clark.
Clark credits her passion for the ocean to her time spent at the New York Aquarium growing up. Her mother worked weekends, so Eugenie would be dropped off at the aquarium every Saturday to spend the day with the fish. Back in the 1920s, aquariums looked a little different than they do now, but they still inspired a strong wish in Clark: to swim in the sea with the fish.
In the 1920s, New York Aquarium had huge pools inside that housed exotic marine life. At one point, there was even a narwhal that lived in the aquarium! Thankfully, modern day aquariums are much nicer homes for fish than aquariums back in the 1920s were.
Her story is absolutely incredible, and the photos of Eugenie Clark from the 1950s in early SCUBA equipment are so cool! In her lifetime, Eugenie conducted 72 submersible dives and countless dives in scuba gear. She was one of the very few fish biologists at the time to study living specimens in this way. She discovered several fish species, but her greatest accomplishment was making great strides in clearing sharks of their bad reputation.
Eugenie Clark was fearless, and she never slowed down. She completed her last scuba dive at 92 years old- just one year before she died. Her legacy is still inspiring ocean-loving girls (and hopefully ocean-timid girls too!) to just keep swimming in pursuit of their passions.
Continued reading:
Lady with a Spear– Eugenie Clark
The Shark Lady– Jess Keating
