It was 1961, and I was a freshman in high school, all of fourteen years old. That year I was honored by my teachers to be nominated for a National Science Foundation grant–I was selected to spend two weeks at the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory as a summer student. The lab was a particularly noteworthy place, its director was Dr Eugenie Clark, the famous “shark lady” of TV fame, a world authority on sharks and marine biology, an accomplished scuba diver, and a very pretty lady. I fell in love on the spot.
The Lab was no longer at Cape Haze, it had been moved to the southern end of Siesta Key in Sarasota, Florida. It has since been renamed the Mote Marine Laboratory in honor of a generous benefactor. It’s still there, and there is now an aquarium there and tours are conducted for tourists. If you’re ever in Sarasota it is a pleasant place to spend an afternoon.
But when I was there, the Lab was strictly a research establishment, and the south end of Siesta Key still practically a wilderness. I quickly settled in, bunking with other summer interns from the high school program. There were several PhDs there conducting research, as well as a handful of graduate students assisting and working on their theses. The summer kids helped out, took classes and were encouraged to follow their own interests. I was particularly interested in plankton, and when I went out on the shark boat I always took the net and collected, bringing the specimens back to the lab for examination and sketching with the binocular microscope.
Dr Clark’s interest at the time was shark behavior, and the boat went out to trot lines set out in the Gulf. A trot line is a long (several hundred feet) rope with an anchor at one end and a buoy at the other so you can locate it. Ever 20-30 feet on the trot was a length of chain about 10 feet long, with a massive hook baited with a mullet. The idea was to catch them alive (although most, unfortunately, were dead by the time we got there). The dead were used for anatomical studies, the living specimens, if they survived the slow trip back to the lab, were released into large pens for the behavioral experiments. We made two trips a day, and we usually found several sharks on each trip. While I was there, only one live specimen made it back to the pens. These were all big fish, between 6 and 12 feet long, mostly tiger and bull sharks, the most common species in those waters.
Catching the fish required hauling the trot across the stern. rebaiting the hooks, and bringing the sharks aboard. If the specimen was alive, it was hooked again with the tow chain and the trot hook removed. It was hard work, but not dangerous as long as you kept the chain taut while swapping hooks so the fish (who was lying across the gunwale of the launch) couldn’t bite you.
Afterwards the fish was slowly towed back to the lab (it had to be towed at the speed a shark normally swims), to keep them from filling up with water and dying, but still moving so they could breath. It was cruel work, but that is the nature of fishing, whether it be for sport, food or science. Often, the catch was mauled by other sharks before we got there. The biggest shark I saw there, weighing in at 1100 pounds, had been ripped from the pectorals to the tail, Only the head and spine were left; the belly, half the fish, was gone.
The shark pens were large circular pools where the sharks were released and allowed to swim free. If they survived the stress of capture, it might be months before they started eating again, but several had already acclimated well to life in the pens. Dr Clarke (she insisted we call her Genie) had devised a clever experiment. to test operant conditioning with the animals. Two large targets (large squares of plywood) were lowered into the water at the end of a pier jutting into the pen. One had vertical black and white stripes, the other horizontal stripes. Which side of the pier each target was lowered on was determined by flipping a coin. The vertical stripe target was rigged with a bell which rang if the shark tapped it with his nose, and he was rewarded with a fish. The horizontal stripe target also had a bell, but there was no reward.. The idea was to train the sharks to go after the vertical targets and to try and condition them to strike it, and leave the other alone. The data collection had just started when I was there, but Genie thought she could already sense a preference for the reward target. We helped by moving the targets around and keeping records. By coincidence, I had a pair of swim trunks with vertical black and white stripes, just like the targets, and the joke was that if I fell in, I had better swim out because if I tried to wade out of the pen I’d never make it. Still, I never felt in danger. A captive shark is not the same as one in the wild. Often they would simply refuse to eat and die. It was so sad.
It was a exciting time for me. We cut one dead hammerhead open at the dock (the researchers were studying the livers, which are huge) and it was full of squirming babies, about two feet long. We gathered them up and released them in the nursery pen. They must have been about ready to be born, because they were all active and aggressive. At feeding time, we threw in frozen mullet, as hard as a rock and about the same size as the juvenile hammerheads. It was a sobering sight. The mullet would hit the water, the baby sharks would strike it amidships, give one shake of the head, and the mullet’s head would go one way, the tail the other. I shuddered, we had been grabbing those guys up by the tail off the dock and throwing them in buckets.
I cut out the obligatory shark jaws from one dead fish, as a decoration for my bedroom, but cut my fingers to ribbons on the teeth. I had to leave it behind because the crabs weren’t done cleaning off the jaws yet and it was smelling prety ripe by the time I got ready to go home. Another time, I mistakenly used some live mangrove snapper from the lab as bait to go after the big cobia that always followed the dead sharks we dragged in (cobia and sharks have some weird commensal relationship that is not too well understood). The snappers were part of someone’s thesis research. I caught hell for that! And I had my first kiss on that trip, one of my fellow NSF interns. Probably her first kiss, too, she was about my age. I wonder where she is now, and if she remembers me.