John Ernest Randall Jr. was born on May 22, 1924, in Los Angeles, to John and Mildred (McKibben) Randall. His father was a contractor, his mother a homemaker; he passed away in 2020: Ichthyologist Extraordinaire; he swam the world’s oceans, identified hundreds of new fish species and named 834 of them.
John E. Randall had wandered off again. He had been diving with family and friends in Malaysia in 1998 when he disappeared. After a long search, the group spotted him walking back over a sand bar. One of the dive masters said in exasperation, “Who is this old guy?”
Hank Bauman, Dr. Randall’s former son-in-law, had a ready answer. “Well, you see all those fish books in your shop?,” he said. “And under the name of the fish, you see the name ‘Randall’ on a lot of them? Well, that ‘old guy’ is Randall.”
Beginning his scientific career in the 1950s as the young field of scuba diving was opening the ocean depths to exploration, Dr. Randall went on to name 30 new genera and 834 new species of fish.
By comparison, the next most prolific ichthyologist “has a lifetime new species count of less than one-third of Jack’s,” Richard L. Pyle, senior curator of ichthyology at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, wrote in an email.
And, he noted, Dr. Randall’s precision in recognizing tiny differences between specimens, and his encyclopedic knowledge of the field, meant that his species identifications were unusually durable; 97 percent of them are still regarded as valid, in contrast to the 50 to 60 percent recorded by other giants in the field. He was the author of 942 papers — “more publications than any other ichthyologist (of any subdiscipline) in history,” Dr. Pyle said.
“I vividly remember feebly crawling onto the swim deck of the ship after Jack finally ended his night dive (our sixth dive of the day), only to see Jack switch out tanks for his second night dive of the evening,” Dr. Pyle wrote on the memorial page. “I barely made it to my bunk before collapsing, but Jack continued to process and photograph his treasured specimens into the wee hours of the morning.”
The next morning, Dr. Randall was back in the water before breakfast.
After graduating from high school, he served in the Army from 1943 to 1946 and then attended the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a bachelor of arts degree in zoology in 1950. After college, he sailed a 37-foot ketch he had refurbished from California to Hawaii with a small crew. In 1955, he earned a Ph.D. in marine zoology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
At the University of Hawaii, he met a fellow graduate assistant, Helen Au; after a lab session that involved dissecting chickens, he invited her back to his sailboat, where they had a chicken dinner. They married in 1951.
She survives him, as do Ms. O’Hara and a son, Rodney, as well as four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. A sister, Susan Randall Ramey, died in 1978.
Highlights taken from the New York Times obituary dated May 29, 2020.
