Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [119]
For my understanding of the cool coastal New Jersey currents that may have drawn the shark, I am grateful to Kenneth W. Able, director of the Rutgers University Marine Field Station in Tuckerton, New Jersey, the institution that overlooks the coast where Charles Vansant was killed. Ken's book, co-authored with Michael Fahay, The First Year in the Life of Estuarine Fishes in the Middle Atlantic Bight, was useful in helping me gain an understanding of the world in which the shark roamed. In an interview, Michael Fahay—a fisheries biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service Laboratory at Sandy Hook, New Jersey—helped me understand the movement of the Gulf Stream off New Jersey.
Among the many texts I relied on to understand the behavior of sharks, I would like to recognize a few here: Great White Sharks: The Biology of Carcharodon carcharias, edited by A. Peter Klimley and David G. Ainley; Great White Shark: The Definitive Look at the Most Terrifying Creature of the Ocean, by Richard Ellis and John E. McCosker; and Sharks and Survival, edited by Perry W. Gilbert. Although his rogue shark theory is now out of fashion, Victor M. Coppleson's Shark Attack provided a fascinating historic survey of shark attack. I am greatly in debt, as well, for my understanding of the variety of shark attacks to H. David Baldridge, author of Shark Attack. My thanks to Dr. Richard G. Fernicola, of Allenhurst, New Jersey, for his tireless devotion to this story over the years. His text, In Search of the Jersey Man-Eater, was especially illuminating in my study of the shark-attack wounds.
There are many books on sea monsters but none as good as Monsters of the Sea: The History, Natural History, and Mythology of the Oceans' Most Fantastic Creatures, by Richard Ellis, whom I owe thanks for my understanding of great white sharks in the lore of sea monsters.
My understanding of the ichthyologists and other scientists in the early twentieth century came from many sources, a few of which I would like to acknowledge here. I gained an understanding of Frederic Augustus Lucas, director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1916, as a Victorian scientist grudgingly moving into the modern world from Fifty Years of Museum Work: Autobiography, Unpublished Papers, and Bibliography, published by the museum in 1933. The respect accorded Lucas as a museum administrator and “all-around naturalist” was evident in the introduction by Henry Fairfield Osborn, a distinguished scientist who named Tyrannosaurus rex. Numerous contemporary newspaper accounts contributed to the profile of Dr. Lucas, and they also helped shape my portrayal of John Treadwell Nichols, the museum's curator of Recent Fishes. In describing John T. Nichols, I also relied on his desk diaries at the Museum of Natural History in New York, as well as his book, co-authored with Paul Bartsch, Fishes and Shells of the Pacific World. A rich portrait of Nichols exists in A Gathering of Wonders: Behind the Scenes at the American Museum of Natural History, by Joseph Wallace. Nichols's Romantic relationship to the sea is evident in his journal articles, press clippings, and also his 1922 book of poetry, Sea-Rimes II.
The ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy's eminence is evident in numerous sources, including his obituary in The New York Times. I gained a sense of his personality