By Colette Bancroft
Tampa Bay Times
In waters off Tampa Bay, Florida, if you happen to see a woman hanging over the side of a boat above an upside-down, live blacknose shark, making a tiny incision in its skin to insert a tracking transmitter, wave hello.
She might well be Jasmin Graham, a marine biologist and the author of the vibrant new memoir “Sharks Don’t Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist.”
The book combines two of her great ions: learning about sharks and promoting diversity in the sciences.
This is a woman who describes sharks as “cute” and “adorable” and says hammerhead sharks are “my first love,” and she means it.
She’s also a Black woman who entered a highly competitive marine science program at Florida State University with outstanding credentials — and walked away from it because of the “toxic, white, male-dominated publish-or-perish environment laced with so much casual and overt sexism and racism people didn’t even seem to notice it because it was seen as ‘just the way it is.’”
And for anyone who thinks that’s ancient history and that women and people of color now have it easy in academia, that happened about five years ago.Hence the “rogue shark scientist” in the book’s subtitle. Graham does her research, which she describes in rich detail, and publishes it without permanent academic or institutional , fishing for grants and funding and cooperative projects.
She’s also one of the co-founders of Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS), an organization with more than 400 providing for gender minorities of color in the field of shark biology to foster diversity in marine science.
Her thrilling of the creation of that organization, amid the depths of the pandemic, and its success in bringing young people into the field is one of the book’s main threads.
The other, of course, is sharks, and how Graham became so fascinated with them.
One of her missions is to correct the many misconceptions about sharks, which are among the oldest creatures on the planet — they were around, in more or less their present form, long before dinosaurs — and among the most resilient.
Despite some people’s irrational fear of sharks, they are a vanishingly tiny threat to humans — but they have every reason to fear us. Graham has the numbers: “On average, only ten people a year are killed by shark encounters … an average of 100 million sharks a year die from encounters with people.”
Some shark populations are robust, while others teeter near extinction, buffeted by habitat loss, climate change, overfishing and more.
Our understanding of them is in its infancy, Graham notes, and too often shrouded by stereotypes.
And therein lies one reason for her bond: “So I don’t just love sharks, I feel for them,” she writes.
“All too often Black people are perceived and mistreated much like sharks; feared, misunderstood and brutalized, often without recourse; assumed to be threatening when so often we’re the ones under threat; portrayed unfairly in the media, so that others are predisposed to have a negative interaction with us.”
Graham grounds her interest in the ocean and in sharks, as well as her awareness of racial discrimination, with stories from her childhood. She grew up first all over the place — her mother was a military nurse — and then rooted in the Black community in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where her father’s family lived for generations.
She recalls going fishing with her dad as one of the best parts of her childhood. And as a grownup scientist, she learns something new when she interviews anglers like him about beach renourishment: “The new sand harms the fish communities because when a storm comes, it washes away, then the blown away sand covers up all the habitats that attract the fish. …
“Why, then, do people continue to see beach renourishment as a solution to changing habitats? Because they’re only talking to property owners. They’re not talking to the people who are relying on the fish population for food.”
Much of the research Graham describes takes place in and around shark-rich Tampa Bay, as she pursues knowledge about such species as the bonnethead shark, the smallest type of hammerhead, and the critically endangered smalltooth sawfish, which has been in the news lately because of a spate of mysterious deaths. (Sawfish aren’t sharks, but both are in the subclass elasmobranch.)
She writes about the origin of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota and its founder, pioneering shark scientist Eugenie Clark, known as the Shark Lady, and about other women who have inspired her, including Catherine Macdonald, one of her mentors. Macdonald also responded to sexism in marine science by founding an organization, called the Field School.
Graham has become something of a shark celebrity, talking about her work on Shark Week documentaries and YouTube. But in this uplifting memoir, the sharks and the scientists who overcome bigotry to learn about them are the stars.
Warwick’s bookstore presents Jasmin Graham
When: 7:30 p.m. Aug. 8
Where: Warwick’s, 7812 Girard Ave., La Jolla
ission: Free (but reserved seat and a book are $28)
Online: warwicks.com/event/graham-2024
