The Chances in Life
Growing up in Florida, Gruber had a deep appreciation for all of the beautiful tourist girls who went there looking for romance.
Miami Beach was always a tourist destination, and in
the late fifties, there were plenty of shows as there are in Las
Vegas now. Eydie Gormé and Steve Lawrence were famous singers of
that era who also staged musical shows. They put one together called
Holiday in Japan, with chorus lines, and scores of dancers and
singers, and brought it to Miami Beach—since Gruber was such a
charmer, he naturally met a showgirl and dated her.
Gruber recalls, “. . .And this friend of mine,
Merle, had the impression that I had a predilection for Japanese
girls, because I was dating this show girl, but she was not correct—I
had a predilection for girls, not just Japanese ones.”
Thinking that he was fascinated by Japanese girls,
Merle told him about Marie Mariko Hirata, a third generation
Japanese-American girl, who lived in the same apartment building as
her boyfriend, and Gruber happily agreed to meet her.
He was utterly charmed by this beautiful girl. Her
mother was a published Haiku poetess, and she had learned all of the
traditional Japanese arts. They fell in love, and were soon
inseparable. It was 1961, and while Gruber was in graduate school,
Marie took care of him. Miami had a big fashion industry in the
fifties and sixties—like California and New York—and she was a
fashion designer in one of the dress houses.
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| Gruber and Hirata in 1969 |
“Our children had the benefit of their mother, who
in my estimation was a creative genius,” Gruber explains. “I am
convinced that the reason for the success of our daughters is that
they had my wife as their mother.”
His eldest daughter, Meegan Minori is a surgeon with
her own medical practice in Oregon. She is a board certified
reconstructive surgeon. Her education earned her two bachelor
degrees, an MD and a Ph.D., and two other post-doctoral licenses at
Washington University in Saint Louis.
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| With Meegan on their sailboat |
His younger daughter, Marisa Aya earned her
undergraduate degree at Berkeley, graduating in three years Phi beta
kappa and Summa cum laude. She entered Harvard law school, graduated
Magna cum laude, and was invited to join the founding law faculty at
Florida International University after a stint as Public Defender in
Washington DC. She became a full tenured professor at an
exceptionally young age. She is currently teaching criminal law in
the University of Colorado law school, and has a rising career.
“So much is pure luck and chance,” Doc marvels,
“that I had met this wonderful woman and we produced these two
successful kids. Who could ever imagine that?
“I wasn’t put off by other people,” he said,
“I had come from a family that had a certain amount of wealth, and
I had a good childhood. I wasn’t hampered by making my own
decisions, and my own decisions were where the luck came from. There
is no rule book—there is no instruction manual for how to do this.
You could never be certain, when you came to a crossroad, which was
the right way. You might be able to work out which might the best
way, but you could never tell for sure.
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| "My daughters' success was due to having my wife as their mother!" |
“My elder daughter was pronounced clinically dead
in a car accident the night she was honored at a high school party.
She had no heartbeat, and no pulse. But luckily, the hospital was
close, they had a resuscitator, and they brought her back to life,
another case of incredible luck.
“If I hadn’t found this experimental cure for my
cancer, I would have been long dead—I have enjoyed, one after
another, such improbable chances!”
In the hippy 1960s Gruber intensively studied
Buddhism and Hinduism, and learned many of the techniques, including
meditation, guided imagery, and chanting, even acupuncture which he
does on himself. He felt that to some extent, these practices had
helped him to recover from cancer. But he could not believe that
there was anything supernatural about it—the techniques worked
because of natural effects. Though people might ascribe his luck, and
the extraordinary road he took in life, to God, karma, or
reincarnation, he didn't feel that it was necessary to invoke the
supernatural. It was not his way to take anything on faith.
To him, his career success, and the life he had been
able to create, had all stemmed from his beloved lemon shark.
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| The lemon shark (my photo) |
Sharks in trouble
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| A shark who escaped fishing, retains a mortal hook (illustration by the writer) |
That was when it became personal. He knew that lemon
sharks were in deep trouble now, because he had personally observed
and recorded their disappearance.
Gruber felt angered. Not only was his careful work
during all of those years wasted, but the loss of the entire local
population of sharks to gill-netting fishing seemed an inexcusable
excess.
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| Watercolour sketch of a lemon shark on patrol (by the writer) |
Thus, he began to write about what he had seen, and
the word got around, because he wrote some scathing articles about
the overfishing of sharks.
The Founding of the American Elasmobranch Society
Gruber founded the American Elasmobranch Society in
1983. At the time, he remembers, there was great interest on the part
of scientists to get funding to study sharks. But it was very
difficult to get a grant to study, and his colleagues wondered how to
go about it, particularly when Gruber received such grants regularly.
Gruber didn't know how he did it—perhaps it was just his luck. At
the time, in the early eighties, he was no longer funded by the Navy,
but had remained good friends with his scientific officer, Dr. Bernie
Zahuranec at the Office of Naval Research.
In 1981, there was a meeting on great white sharks,
hosted by the California Academy of Sciences. This was the first
meeting of its kind, and everyone who was interested in white sharks
attended. During the sessions, Gruber was approached by a group of
colleagues, who told him that they wanted to get together form a
society to generate interest in getting shark research funded. There
was a meeting at the poolside with Dr. Zahuranec, Dr. Don Nelson, and
Dr. Leonard Compagno, and they all put forth their ideas, and hashed
out what it would take to establish an academic society.
Afterwards, though he was still fighting his cancer
with toxic chemotherapy, Gruber worked on the plan. He produced
by-laws, contacted everyone by letter, telephone, or fax, (there was
no e-mail or Internet back then) and eventually he gathered together
the group and they commissioned him to go forward.
They all said, “Yes we want this, we will support
your plan,” but it was mostly verbal as Gruber recalled. "It was
basically a one-man operation, but Dr. Zahuranec was very encouraging
and helpful."
Finally, in 1983, with the help of his father,
Sidney, who was a banker, and his brother, Herbert, Gruber founded
and incorporated the American Elasmobranch Society in the State of
Florida and later was granted non-profit status. He funded it with
his own money.
With the assistance of Dr. Zahuranec, Gruber even
donated 11,000 dollars to the foundation—in the eighties that was a
lot of money—to set up a fund for students who submitted the best
research papers at the annual Society meeting. It is still in place
today, and is called the Gruber award.
Gruber ran The American Elasmobranch Society for 5
years, by which time it was well established, and he could hand it
over to others who would keep it going. Now, 32 years later, with
over 500 members from around the globe, it is the largest society
dedicated to shark research in the world.
The Shark Specialist Group, of IUCN
At the 1991 annual meeting of the AES in New York
city, a gentleman from Species Survival Commission, of the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature, (IUCN) got up in
front of the large audience and announced, “Will Dr. Gruber please
come up!”
His name was George Rabb and he was the chairman of
the Species Survival Commission (SSC), a science-based network of
volunteer experts from around the world. The SSC is the group which
sets up the IUCN specialist groups. Its goal is the achievement of “A
just world that values and conserves nature through positive action
to reduce the loss of diversity of life on earth.”
Rabb began a presentation on the need to protect
sharks from further decimation through the establishment of a Shark
Specialist Group, and declared that Gruber ought to be the one to
take charge. An astonished Gruber asked if he had the right person in
mind, since he knew nothing about conservation, but Rabb had looked
at Gruber's work, and was convinced that he did. So Gruber agreed to
give it a try.
With his usual intensity, he threw himself into the
work. Systematically, he built it up, got the right people involved,
and established networking groups around the world. He worked as
director of the new Shark Specialist Group (SSG) for five years, and
got it up and running, until it was able to go on by itself.
Gruber saw his role as an instigator—he was the
person who had an idea, and who went for it—who got things started,
and then handed them over to those who were better at running them.
It was characteristic of him to make a decision, and then drive ahead
as if there was no turning back—he knew only one way to go, and
that was forward. Always he had a strong spirit and an iron will, to
go ahead and accomplish what he had in mind, no matter what it took.
It was the same when he went to military prep
school. Though he found it hard, very hard, he was determined to make
it no matter what it took—there was no turning back. He went ahead
and did well. That was characteristic of him.
The great hammerhead shark revisited
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| Photo courtesy of Diego Garcia, Discovery Canada, Daily Planet |
Though long past retirement, Gruber continues to
savour every moment of his life. He is still involved with research
at Bimini, and on free afternoons, enjoys himself flying in vintage
WWII aircraft over the blue seas of Florida and California.
He is often interviewed by the media on the subject
of sharks, and appears regularly on National Geographic, where he
holds the position of NGS Explorer. He also appears on Discovery and
BBC Natural History shows, in his personal mission to help change
public attitudes to these maligned and misunderstood animals.
During a recent filming for Discovery, he dove down
to hand a fish to a large, circling hammerhead, and remembered again
his dramatic meeting as a young man, with the majestic shark that had
inspired his career.
At that time, like everyone else, he had never
doubted that sharks were insatiable killers. There had been so many
stories about them coming out of WWII, when sharks had supposedly
devoured the crews of sinking ships, and planes that had ended up in
the ocean, that sharks were seen as the horror of the ocean.
In 1958,
there was one over-arching theme in the public attitude to them—the
only good shark is a dead shark.
But during his dramatic meeting with the hammerhead,
in spite of his fear, he had felt a deep need to find out something
more about them. After all, many animals are predators, and even a
cow will kill in the right situation. During the intervening decades,
he has found out about them, and what he has learned, is that the
early opinions were all wrong. To think that sharks are the
devil-fish from hell was wrong from every point of view.
“Sharks are not man-eaters or woman-eaters, he
declares. “If you want to find a man-eater, you have to look at the
Nile crocodile, which kills and eats upwards of a dozen victims year,
or Bengal tigers, which stalk humans in the Sundarband (India) tiger
reserve and kill an average of 23 people a year, year in and year
out.
“Sharks kill a few people, but compared to most
everything else, they are not even on the radar.
“Originally, our understanding of the role of
sharks was that they would eat you and therefore they should be
killed. Not only the lay public, but many of the most important
marine scientists believed that. Fifty years later, when we have come
close to succeeding in sweeping sharks from the sea, we have found
out that the role sharks play in the ocean is so crucial, that we are
turning the ocean into a sick ocean by killing them. In fact, the only good shark is the one that is
swimming around outside the reef taking care of the environment for
us, and keeping it cleaned up.”
There has been a 180 degree
turnaround in thinking about the role of sharks. Gruber is grateful
to the various conservation societies, such as the Pew Charitable
Trust, for protecting sharks. They are doing a wonderful job, and he
hopes that this change in the public attitude towards saving sharks
has come in time.
This time, when he dove down towards the great
circling hammerhead, he felt no fear, because he knew that there is
no real concern about such a shark attacking a person at this place
in Bimini. There may still have been doubt about that even 12 to 14
years ago, but now, he is sure of it. As he handed the fish to the
shark he was aware only of its streamlined beauty, and felt the deep
familiar thrill, just to be there, with the shark.
“Sharks are very smart,” he said. “They learn
quickly, and they are only interested in the food you bring. They are
truly single-minded!”
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| Photo courtesy of Diego Garcia, Discovery Canada, Daily Planet |
Sharks and the ocean
Sharks have been evolving separately from all other vertebrates, for close to half a billion years, so they represent an ancient, and very different, evolutionary line of animals.
“Though they are commonly referred to as fish, in
fact, they are as different from fish as a frog is different from an
elephant,” Gruber explains. “Their internal fertilization has
produced a completely different life history strategy—sharks
operate more like sea turtles and whales than they do like fishes in
their strategy of birth and fecundity and their maternal investment
in the babies.”
“Because of their long and independent
evolutionary history, sharks have developed very highly evolved organ
systems. Their heart is more like a mammal’s than a fish’s, their
kidneys are more like a mammal’s than a fish’s, and their brains
are large, correlating with their learning capabilities. Their
behavioural repertoire is very complicated with regards to such
things as mating and courtship—things we still know very little
about—much more complicated that what we see in other fish-like
vertebrates.”
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| A pregnant shark (illustration by the writer) |
During this long evolution, sharks survived many
extinction cycles, and each time, they adapted to niches left by the
species that died out. Repeatedly they took advantage of the
extinctions because niches opened for them to fill—this is called
evolutionary radiation.
Thus sharks evolved many forms, including the
hammerhead, and display great diversity. The hammerhead shark has
turned out to be a very modern species, having evolved in just the
last thirty million years. It is a highly successful apex predator in
every way—in terms of size, social behaviour, feeding,
biochemistry, and biology.
Contrary to common belief, not all sharks are top
predators—some are bottom feeders, some eat fish. The largest
sharks, such as the whale shark and the basking shark, are filter
feeders, while others eat whales. They have adapted to a wide variety
of niches, from the sunlit shallows, to the depths of the abyss, and
their influence is felt from the top to the bottom of the ocean's
food web.
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| A hammerhead shark |
The ocean has developed sharks, and they have been
shaping its ecology since vertebrate life emerged in the oceans, back
near the beginning of the Devonian, over 400 million years ago. They
were the animals successful enough to survive extinction episodes,
while other species died out, and now, though their influence
permeates the ecology of the ocean, we have specifically targeted
them, and are driving them right into extinction. Out of hate, or for
their fins and other frivolous products, we are killing the very
fabric of the ocean ecosystems.
So Gruber's final word is a warning: The killing
must stop, or one day we may find that by killing off the sharks, we
have destroyed the ocean's vitality. Its ability to continue to play
its role as part of the life-support system of our earth will
certainly be impacted.
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| Dr. Gruber : The killing must stop. |
(c) Ila France Porcher, 2015
All photos courtesy of Dr. Gruber unless otherwise indicated
This third installment of my article "Samuel H. 'doc' Gruber : Pioneer of Shark Science" was originally published in issue 66 of X-ray Dive Magazine
This third installment of my article "Samuel H. 'doc' Gruber : Pioneer of Shark Science" was originally published in issue 66 of X-ray Dive Magazine
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