Eugenie Clark, whose childhood rapture with fish in a New York City aquarium led to a life of scholarly adventure in the littorals and depths of the Seven Seas and to a global reputation as a marine biologist and expert on sharks, died on Wednesday at her home in Sarasota, Fla. She was 92.
The cause was lung cancer, her son Nikolas Konstantinou said.
Long before “Jaws” scared the wits out of swimmers, Dr. Clark rode a 40-foot whale shark off Baja California, ran into killer great white sharks while scuba diving in Hawaii, studied “sleeping” sharks in undersea caves off the Yucatán, witnessed a shark’s birth and found a rare six-gill shark in a submersible dive off Bermuda.
She also swam into schools of man-eating barracuda and had disconcerting encounters with 500-pound clams and giant squid. Despite close calls, she was never attacked, and she tended to make light of the dangers. Indeed, she told of the privileges of exploring an undersea world of exotic creatures and enchanting beauty.
Dr. Clark was an ichthyologist and oceanographer whose academic credentials, teaching and research posts, scientific activities and honors filled a 20-page curriculum vitae, topped by longtime roles as a professor at the University of Maryland and director of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota.
She also wrote three books, 80 scientific treatises and more than 70 articles and professional papers; lectured at 60 American universities and in 19 countries abroad; appeared in 50 television specials and documentaries; was the subject of many biographies and profiles; made intriguing scientific discoveries; and had four species of fish named for her.
For all her scientific achievements, Dr. Clark was also a figure of popular culture who used her books, lectures and expertise to promote the preservation of ecologically fragile shorelines, to oppose commercial exploitation of endangered species and to counteract misconceptions, especially about sharks.
She insisted that “Jaws,” the 1975 Steven Spielberg film based on a Peter Benchley novel, and its sequels inspired unreasonable fears of sharks as ferocious killers. Car accidents are far more numerous and terrible than shark attacks, she said in a 1982 PBS documentary, “The Sharks.”
She said at the time that only about 50 shark attacks on humans were reported annually and that only 10 were fatal, and that the great white shark portrayed in “Jaws” would attack only if provoked, while most of the world’s 350 shark species were not dangerous to people at all.
“When you see a shark underwater,” she said, “you should say, ‘How lucky I am to see this beautiful animal in his environment.’ ”
Ms. Clark was born in New York City on May 4, 1922, to Charles Clark and the former Yumico Mitomi. Her father died when she was 2. Her mother worked in Lower Manhattan, and when the girl was 9 she began leaving her on Saturday mornings at an aquarium near the Battery. Fascinated, Eugenie persuaded her mother to buy her a 15-gallon tank and kept fish, toads, snakes and a small alligator at home.
She graduated from Bryant High School in Queens and Hunter College, where she majored in zoology, and earned a master’s degree at New York University.
After doing research at the University of California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, she was a research assistant at the Museum of Natural History in New York and returned to N.Y.U., where she earned a doctorate in 1950, focusing on fish reproduction.
Further marine biology studies in Massachusetts and the West Indies led to a published paper on the visual abilities of fish. In 1949, the Navy sent her to the South Seas to study poisonous fish. Taught by Palau Islanders to spear fish underwater, she collected hundreds of specimens. A year later she collected 300 species of fish from the Red Sea, three of them new to science.
Dr. Clark was married five times. She and her second husband, Dr. Ilias Konstantinu, an orthopedic surgeon, had four children — Hera, Aya, Themistokles and Nikolas — and were divorced in 1967. They survive her, as does one grandson.
Her first book, “Lady With a Spear,” was published in 1953. In it, she told of fish that variously inflated themselves to incredible dimensions, stood on their heads to show masculinity, advertised themselves with yellow lipstick, grunted like pigs, stung with deadly effect, and had two sets of eyes — to see in and out of water.
From 1955 to 1967, Dr. Clark was the founding director of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory in Florida, which became the Mote Marine Laboratory and in 1978 was moved to City Island in Sarasota. She resumed work with the lab as a consultant in 1986 and later became its director emeritus.
In 1968 she joined the University of Maryland, where she became a full professor and senior research scientist, taught for decades and became professor emeritus in 1992. She received many honorary degrees and awards.
Her second book, “The Lady and the Sharks” (1969), explored the behavior and physiology of sharks and other marine life and her experiences as a diver, biologist and teacher. With Ann McGovern, a biographer of Dr. Clark, she also wrote “Desert Benealth the Sea” (1991).
Over the years, Dr. Clark made more than 70 deep dives in submersibles, once to 12,000 feet. She found whale sharks, the world’s largest fish, 3,200 feet down, and sharks with six pairs of gills (most have five pairs) in the deep sea off Bermuda. She developed a shark repellent from an exudate of flatfish called the Red Sea Moses sole and taught sharks, once thought to be untrainable, to perform whole sequences of tasks.
“Sharks are among the most perfectly constructed creatures in nature,” she said. “Some forms have survived for two hundred million years.”
In 2004, after Dr. Clark injured her Achilles’ heel in a dive, doctors discovered she had lung cancer. She stopped diving temporarily, but the cancer went into remission. In 2009, she celebrated her 87th birthday in a submersible 900 feet under the surface of Lake Tahoe. She did it again when she turned 88.
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