Sweet Briar College’s Guion Science Center is home to an eclectic bunch of charismatic creatures, the faculty of the science and math departments notwithstanding. Now, the chameleons, monarch butterflies and occasional visiting salamanders have been joined by a colony of sharks.

Specifically, they are chain catsharks, a small species named for their chain-pattern markings and (some say) cat-like eyes. They are in the charge of associate professor of biology John Morrissey, who recently joined SBC’s faculty from Hofstra University on Long Island, N.Y.


Being a shark expert has garnered John Morrissey plenty of attention. “If I were swimming in clam-infested waters, no one would care,” he says.Eventually he will set up three aquarium systems on Guion’s first floor. One will consist of six 20-gallon fish tanks, each home to an egg-laying female. The second also will have six 20-gallon tanks, subdivided to house babies and eggs, which take a year to hatch. The third, one big aquarium, will contain those not part of active studies.

Morrissey recently returned from Long Island bearing an Igloo cooler containing some 25 juveniles and 21 eggs in various stages of development. The remainder – there are a total of about 65 reared from eggs and eight or 10 wild-caught adults – are still being used for research, and will be moved at a later date.

Morrissey is an expert on sharks, having spent a career studying them in the wild and in the lab. He started the colony almost four years ago at Hofstra with the intent of studying the “complete natural history of the species,” he said.

They are a deep-sea animal about which little is known – in part because there has been too little scientific study of that part of the Earth’s habitat, Morrissey believes. But increasingly, he said, commercial fisherman encounter catsharks in their nets as they are forced into deeper waters by a scarcity of fish nearer shore and related conservation restrictions.

Figuring out how to balance conservation with maintaining peoples’ livelihoods is among the reasons he finds catsharks useful to study. As lab subjects go, “They are like the white mice of the shark world and that really blows the lid off the research possibilities,” he said.

Juvenile chain catsharks are Guion's newest residents.Because they are closely related to about a hundred other species, he can extrapolate what he learns about their biology to others in the family, said Morrissey, who once spontaneously jumped in the water with a pregnant 14-foot tiger shark just to get a blood sample from her.

While the catsharks’ shallow-water cousins have been studied extensively, it’s “catch as catch can,” Morrissey said. Much of his work has been with juvenile lemon sharks in the lab or with full-grown animals caught in the ocean and released. That leaves a lot of gaps in their lives, from physical development to reproductive cycles, that are hard to observe in a controlled way.

At about a foot-and-a-half long, adult catsharks can live their entire lives in modest aquariums at a small women’s college in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“Another really useful perk about studying this shark is that it … excites the teacher in me,” Morrissey said, noting that students’ research interests vary. Some are drawn to cellular biology, others dissection or working with live animals.

“With this in-house colony I really feel like I can satisfy the preferences of all of our students.”

That excited Sweet Briar, too.

Adult chain catsharks reach about 18 inches. Morrissey hasn’t been bitten by one – yet – but guesses “you’d get a cheese-grater wound.”The biology department was searching for an “excellent teacher with student-friendly research, a personality and style that would mesh well with the rest of the department, and strength in new areas,” department chair Linda Fink said in an e-mail.

Hiring Morrissey for a rare full-time faculty opening meant marine biology could be added to the curriculum. “This is a course that John clearly loves to teach,” Fink said.

He brings other expertise as well, including teaching vertebrate morphology and comparative animal physiology, assuming responsibility for the department’s scanning electron microscope, and pre-health and pre-vet advising.

For his part, Morrissey never was content in fast-paced, pushy metropolitan New York, even after teaching and studying at Hofstra for a combined 23 years. The son of a Maine chicken farmer – who attributes his sturdy 6-foot, 7-inch frame to years of standing in poultry manure – said he was “looking for a tiny school in the woods” to move to.

He began searching only after his wife, Long Island-native Donna McLaughlin, also had had enough of big-city life. “We were both a little nervous,” he said, recalling the decision to leave Long Island. “It was kind of a ‘Green Acres’ moment.”

They haven’t regretted it, said Morrissey, who likes that he might see as many turkeys and deer as cars on his commute from near Rustburg. Not to mention the smaller classes at Sweet Briar. “It’s so much easier to reach fourteen people than one hundred fourteen.”

Regarding his research, he doesn’t believe he’ll miss having graduate assistants. “If I could wave a magic wand, I’d rather have that exceptional Sweet Briar student than a mediocre graduate student.”

— By Jennifer McManamay, SBC staff writer