Finding Community As A Black Woman In Shark Science

The following is an excerpt from Sharks Don’t Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist by Jasmin Graham.

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My life was changed forever by a single photograph. It was of a Black female researcher floating underwater with an adorable nurse shark. Nurse sharks are large coastal sharks that like warm waters, like those of southern Florida. Nurse sharks are like cats: they have “whiskers”—extensions on their lipscalled barbels—and they are cute and seem cuddly when they want to be, but when they don’t want to, boy, they’re ready to fight you. I love how fun it can be to just vibe in the ocean with them when they’re happy with you.

In the photo, I could see the sunlight refracted through the clear turquoise water and thick, familiar seagrass dancing at the scientist’s feet. It looked like many of the places where I work, a natural cathedral of bending light and amazing creatures. I laughed that the researcher was wearing all pink and red: pink bathing suit, red rash guard, popping pink nail polish—even her snorkel was Barbie pink.

I sat up straight with my phone in hand. It was after mid- night. I was still awake after most of my neighborhood had turned in—except, of course, for the perpetual salsa party up the street. Even my dog, Iggy, was fast asleep in his crate, upside down like a dead bug. I’d been scrolling on Twitter when I came across the scientist’s post, #BlackInNature. What?! I thought. A Black woman working with sharks! There’s more than just me?

I’m a marine biologist and shark scientist; at the time, I was the only Black member of the American Elasmobranch Society (AES), a professional scientific society for those who study sharks, skates, and rays: fish with cartilage skeletons rather than bones. I was in the midst of writing a paper on a large-scale study that synthesized data from members of the Smalltooth Sawfish Recovery Implementation Team, which is in charge of stewarding the conservation efforts of this charismatic and critically endangered animal. Lately, though, I’d been telling myself that when this paper was published, I was done with science. Get me outta here! I loved doing science, but I also loved my mental health, and the two just didn’t seem compatible anymore. I was on the verge of giving up a career in a field that I was passionate about because I was burnt out and didn’t have the energy to keep fighting for space any longer.

In another photo, the same woman scientist was leaning over the side of a boat, her hand affectionately resting in front of a lemon shark’s dorsal fin and her red nails gleaming in the bright sun. Her hair was natural, like I wear my hair when out in the field, and her excitement was palpable, the way I still feel no matter how many times I’m around these majestic animals. Sharks are truly the most amazing creatures you could ever meet–they can do things no other animals can; they can adapt to changes in their environment in ways that no other animal can; and they have survived longer than any other animal in the course of natural history. R.E.S.P.E.C.T. These creatures are one of a kind. Dinosaurs don’t have nothin’ on sharks for resilience and ecological importance.

Looking at these photos, I wondered: Could there be a world in which I didn’t have to give up studying these amazing creatures?

“Yay for Black girls who study sharks. We should start a club lol,” I tweeted at this mystery woman, hoping she could feel my smile.

I was still staring at her photos when she tweeted back.

“I am so so serious we should,” she wrote. Her name was Carlee Jackson, and I learned that she was a shark conservationist and marine-turtle specialist working in South Florida, not far from where I lived. The tweets flowed for a bit, and then Amani Webber-Schultz and Jaida Elcock, two other shark scientists, entered the conversation. Here were two more Black women in what I thought was a small world of shark science. I felt like I had discovered a unicorn—and then another and then another. We moved over to DMs and in a flurry of excitement, each of us explained how we knew from an early age that we wanted to work on the water—that it was what we felt we were meant to do.

Jaida grew up landlocked in the desert in Arizona. She always knew she wanted to work with animals in some way, and after a high school internship at an aquarium in Scottsdale, she became hooked on sharks. Now she is a PhD student at the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Joint Program. Amani grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and had the Pacific Ocean and the Monterey Bay Aquarium as her backyard. In high school, she took part in a coral reef restoration project in Fiji, which got her interested in conservation. While studying marine sciences as an undergrad, she won a scholarship that allowed her to do fieldwork studying sharks, and there she discovered that being out on a boat and working up—catching, gathering scientific data from, and then releasing—sharks brought her more joy than she’d ever experienced before. She is getting her PhD at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Meanwhile, Carlee was raised in Detroit, Michigan, without any access to the ocean. When she was about five or six, she picked up a book about sharks and fell in love. From that point on, she decided she was destined to become a shark scientist—ending up with undergraduate and graduate degrees in marine biology. After listening to these amazing stories, I told all of them about my own childhood, growing up as a military brat and living all over the country, but falling in love with the ocean on visits to my grandparents in South Carolina.

Even those of us who grew up landlocked or without access to the ocean had found our way to the sea, and we all marveled that we got to do this work–who knew this was a job? But we also all had stories, one eerily similar to the next, of daily, casual racial microaggressions (and sometimes macroaggressions) from peers who seemed to have no clue how internalized their bias was or that our differences could actually be an asset. We swapped stories about often being left to clean up after a meeting or spoken to as if we were lazy (not one of us is lazy). All of us seemed united by our feelings of exclusion but also by our mutual passion for sharks, and I felt the warmth of belonging for the first time in a long, lonely while.

Excerpted from SHARKS DON’T SINK: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist by Jasmin Graham. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Jasmin Graham.