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Center for Shark Research
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Perry Gilbert: The Mote Years
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Perry was drawn to the laboratory for his own shark research, much of which was conducted there in the early 1960s. However, the laboratory's future became uncertain in 1965, when Genie resigned her directorship for personal reasons to move back to New York. Laboratory operations continued for a year and a half under two interim directors - marine biologist Sylvia Earle and ichthyologist Charles Breder Jr. - until a committee was formed to find a new laboratory director. This committee, which included Clark and Earle, was headed by Florida businessman William Mote, who had helped save the laboratory with his financial support and business acumen.
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The committee searched for the right combination of scientist and administrator who could run a successful operation, and, like the U.S. Navy 10 years before, they chose Perry Gilbert. In 1967, while still a professor at Cornell, Perry became director of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory on Siesta Key. He agreed to take the job as interim director for only one year, for he had no intention of staying on as laboratory director beyond that.
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The laboratory budget was still small, and so Perry had to be creative to bring scientists to the facility. Among those he attracted to the laboratory were Stewart Springer and David Baldridge. Perry and Stew were old friends, having become acquainted many years before during a one-week research cruise on the OREGON out of Pascagoula. Their memories on that cruise included catching an oceanic whitetip shark, Carcharhinus longimanus, which broke the wire leader just before they could land it. Four days later and more than 500 miles away, they caught the same shark with hook and broker leader still attached.
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Dave Baldridge, on the other hand, was a retired Navy captain with a Ph.D. who came to Mote to study shark attack and antishark measures. His work under Perry's direction included the first analysis of records in the Shark Attack File, which was based at Mote Marine Laboratory at that time, to understand worldwide patterns of shark attack. Baldridge also was one of the first to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of most chemicals in repelling sharks under typical conditions at sea.
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During his time as Mote laboratory director, Perry never slowed down in his own shark research interests. He continued to publish profusely, if more collaboratively, and he stimulated studies by many others on various aspects of shark biology. But beyond shark research, Perry expanded Mote's scope to include biomedicine, microbiology, neurobiology and behavior, ecology, and environmental health. Using the contacts he had cultured over 30 years, Perry invited specialists in those fields to be visiting investigators at Mote, and his offer was accepted by many scientists from universities, museums and federal laboratories such as the National Institutes of Health.
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 By the late 1970s, Mote Marine Laboratory was facing a new challenge. The laboratory was running out of space, not only because of the success of its research program but also because coastal erosion was cutting into the laboratory's property on Siesta Key. Once again, Perry Gilbert was up to the challenge. He directed the planning, design, local politicking, fund raising, and construction of a new laboratory facility on City Island, a different location in Sarasota. The new laboratory building would be much larger than the Siesta Key facility, with future growth in mind. After Mote Marine Laboratory successfully moved into its new quarters on City Island in 1978, Perry retired as the laboratory's director.
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During the 1960s, there was yet another marine laboratory that drew Perry's special interest. The Vanderbilt family had established the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory in Placida, Florida, for Eugenie Clark in 1955. The young ichthyologist from New York quickly discovered the rich diversity and abundance of shark species along the southwest Florida coast, so Genie began a new program in shark research at her laboratory. With the departure of the Vanderbilts from Florida, she moved the Cape Haze laboratory farther up the Florida Gulf coast to Siesta Key near Sarasota in 1960, supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
With their distinctly different backgrounds and talents, Perry Gilbert and Bill Mote became a remarkable team. Together they visited many marine laboratories along both U.S. coasts to plan the Siesta Key laboratory's future course. Meanwhile, Perry worked out a relationship with Cornell that enabled him to keep his professorship and return four times a year to lecture in neurobiology, behavior, and marine biology, a sweet deal for both Cornell and the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory. What had started as an interim position became permanent, and Perry stayed on as director - of which was now renamed Mote Marine Laboratory in honor of the Mote family - from 1967 to 1978.
Under Perry's leadership, Mote Marine Laboratory's legacy of shark research gained worldwide recognition. With ONR funding, he designed and constructed a shark-holding facility consisting of a concrete pool 50 feet in diameter, connected by a flume to a doughnut-shaped channel 10 feet wide and 80 feet in outside diameter. For the first time, shark biologists could safely work with live sharks under standardized controlled conditions. Mote resident and visiting scientists began testing the effectiveness of shark repellents for the Navy, from chemicals and electrical fields to the use of trained Atlantic bottlenosed dolphins, Tursiops truncatus, to repel sharks.
After retiring as a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, Stew accepted Perry's invitation to come to Mote and run a satellite laboratory back in Placida, the location of the original Cape Haze laboratory. The two collaborated on a number of shark projects, among them a study of the basking shark, Cetorhinus maximus, which was published in Copeia in 1976 (Springer and Gilbert, 1976).