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Center for Shark Research
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Perry Gilbert: Evolution of a Shark Biologist
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Through his years of teaching in comparative anatomy, Perry supervised the dissection of countless numbers of specimens, among them thousands of sharks. That detailed knowledge of shark anatomy first ignited, and then continued to fuel, what became Perry's first passion in his scientific research - the biology and behavior of sharks. And thanks to Cornell's liberal attitude of granting generous time for research - long vacations, free summers, and sabbaticals every seventh year - Perry was able to pursue that passion all over the world, while remaining a teaching professor at Cornell. During those periods away from the university, Perry conducted research at the MBL in Woods Hole, Mt. Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Maine, Lerner Marine Laboratory in the Bahamas, Cape Haze Marine Laboratory in Florida, Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, and various other laboratories in Florida, Hawaii, South Africa, Australia, Japan, and the South Seas. He also led scientific expeditions to exotic places like Tahiti and British Honduras.
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Throughout his research career, Perry published on practically every aspect of shark biology imaginable, and it is this legacy for which he is chiefly known. The only aspect of shark biology he assiduously avoided was taxonomy, which he was happy to concede to his esteemed ichthyologist colleagues.
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 Perry's research record, however, includes much more than shark biology. His formal research career began in 1935, when his first scientific abstract appeared on the structure and function of avian lungs and air sacs, later published as his first full paper (Gilbert, 1939). From there, he went on to study the comparative anatomy, physiology, and embryology of fishes, amphibians, birds and mammals, publishing extensively on these subjects through the late 1950s in Science, Anatomical Record, Journal of Morphology, Ecology, and Copeia. Among these papers was a series of landmark studies on the origin and development of vertebrate eye muscles, including human eye research conducted as a Carnegie Fellow at John Hopkins University in 1949-1950.
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However, Perry's special fascination with sharks can be traced back as far as the early 1940s. In his teaching laboratory at Cornell, where he examined lots of pregnant spiny dogfish, Squalus acanthias, Perry was particularly intrigued by the shark's urogenital system. In 1937, Bertram Smith had published a major monograph on the anatomy of the frilled shark, Chlamydoselachus anguineus, based on three female specimens (Smith, 1937). When Perry discovered a male frilled shark in the Cornell fish collection, he knew he could make observations of its urogenital system that would add new information to Smith's descriptions. He searched other collections for additional male specimens and he found one in the U.S. National Museum collection and two in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History - right where Smith had done his own work on the females.
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Based on those specimens, Perry worked out in some detail the male urogenital system of the frilled shark. This work, his first real introduction to shark morphology, resulted in his first publication in Copeia (Gilbert, 1941), a note on the morphometrics of the four specimens. (He eventually published eight papers in Copeia, six on sharks, one on tunas, and one on frogs.) Two years later he published a longer description of male frilled shark anatomy in the Journal of Morphology (Gilbert, 1943).
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 This foray into the shark's urogenital system led Perry to study the reproductive anatomy of male spiny dogfish and smooth dogfish, Mustelus canis, which he was able to examine while at Woods Hole, resulting in a series of seminal papers in the mid-1950s on the functional morphology of shark claspers and siphon sacs. In the summers of 1957-1958, Perry conducted research at the Mt. Desert Island Biological Laboratory, using radioactive tracers to study the nutritive transfer between mother and embryo spiny dogfish. In this work, he was assisted by his oldest son David, a brilliant undergraduate student at Harvard at the time. (David Gilbert went on to earn his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in visual studies, no doubt influenced by his father's research on shark vision. In 1979, when David was developing his own productive research career in biophysics and neurobiology, he died tragically of pneumonia at the age of 39.)
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By the mid-1950s, Perry was beginning to make a name for himself as an expert on sharks, which at that time were of interest only to a select group of academics. This reputation grew after he worked out a method to anesthetize large sharks, with F.G. Wood at Marineland on Florida's east coast. The work resulted in a paper in Science (Gilbert and Wood, 1957), perhaps Perry's most oft-cited paper because of its broad applicability to working with elasmobranchs, even today. Through this and his other publications on shark anatomy, as well as his active participation in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) - which later made him a Fellow of the society - Perry Gilbert was becoming known as the professor of sharks.
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At the same time, a new research priority was appearing on the horizon, not from the halls of academia but rather from the Department of Defense. During World War II, the U.S. Navy had been troubled by accounts of shipwrecked sailors and downed aviators attacked by sharks. In the postwar years, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) decided to address the problem, and they searched for someone who knew about the predators, a rare expertise in those days. They found Perry Gilbert of Cornell University. That discovery was to affect dramatically the course of Perry's research, and to a large extent, the rest of his life.
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