"Shark Lady" Eugenie Clark honored with Forever stamp

The U.S. Postal Service is honoring ichthyologist and oceanographer Eugenie Clark, the founding scientist behind Sarasota's Mote Marine Laboratory, with a Forever stamp.

Driving the news: The stamp will be unveiled at an event at Mote on Wednesday, on what would've been Clark's 100th birthday. She died in 2015.

Why it matters: Known as "Shark Lady," the insatiably curious Clark made landmark contributions to marine science for 50 years on hundreds of dives around the world, but always returned to Mote.

The U.S. Postal Service says Clark "spent her career working tirelessly to change public perception about sharks."

• "She demonstrated that lemon sharks could be trained to do complex tasks, disproved the notion that some shark species must keep swimming in order to survive, and debunked myths about sharks as vicious, fearsome creatures," USPS said in a statement.
• "She also made significant contributions to the study of hermaphroditism in fishes, discovered several fish species, and even found that one species naturally repels sharks."

Of note: The postal service chooses 25-30 commemorative stamps a year, out of a pool of as many as 30,000.