Eugenie Clark serves on the board of directors of the International Society of Cryptozoology. A famous diver and scientist, she has explored the underwater world of many seas and has been popularized through a series of Scholastic paperback young-adult books, including Shark Lady:
The True Story of Eugenie Clark; Further Adventures of Shark Lady Eugenie Clark; and The Desert Beneath the Sea, written with her frequent diving companion Ann McGovern. Clark's life is an interesting one: she has been married six times and is a seasoned world traveller. Clark's many adventures include diving into caves in Mexico to study “sleeping” sharks, discovering a Red Sea fish that keeps big sharks away, and proving that sharks have intelligence and good memory.
Clark is a professor emerita and senior research scientist in the Department of Zoology at the University of Maryland. An ichthyologist who began her studies on the behaviour and reproductive isolating mechanisms of freshwater aquarium fish, Clark later combined her love for diving with the study of marine fish: first hard-hat diving and snorkeling, now using scuba and submersibles. Clark has studied shark behaviour in the deep sea from submersibles at depths of one thousand to twelve thousand feet. Throughout the 19905, she conducted seventy-one dives off Grand Cayman, Bermuda, the Bahamas, California, and Japan to study the behaviour, movements, and population density of large deep-sea fish.
Clark has a decades-long involvement with cryptozoology. She maintains a passionate interest in discoveries of new species of fish. As recently as 1993, she published her discovery of Helcogramma vulcana, a new triple-fin fish from the Banda Sea, Indonesia. In 1996, according to cryptozoologist Ben Roesch, Clark gave an excellent slide lecture throughout Canada, entitled “Sea Monsters and Other Mysteries of the Deep,” in which she discussed a New Zealand 1977 “sea monster” carcass (found to be a rotten basking shark), weird octopuses from the depths, whale sharks, and reports of possible new “cookie-cutter” sharks from subarctic waters. For many years through 1997, Clark taught a course on “Sea Monsters and Deep Sea Sharks” at the University of Maryland. Margery Facklam has written a biography, Eugenie Clark and the Sleeping Sharks.
SEE ALSO:
SOURCE:
The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters,Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature
Written by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark – Copyright 1999 Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark