
Jack Randall at an FAO/ICLARM/MSI/NORAD workshop held in early October 1995
in the Philippines, and devoted to the creation guide the fishery resources of the Central
Western Pacific (see Froese and Pauly 2000, p. 13). Photo by Rachel ‘Aque’ Atanacio.
Text by Daniel Pauly.
The public at large and scientists who are not taxonomists share a view of taxonomists as hard to connect with and sometimes remote; this may apply to some of them, but as with everything, there are exceptions. One of these exceptions was Jack Randall.
John Ernest Randall was born in 1924 in Los Angeles, California. He studied at UCLA and then went to the University of Hawai’i, which he left in 1955 with a Ph.D. After various jobs in Florida and Puerto Rico, he became a Senior Ichthyologist at the Bishop Museum in Hawai’i (see Wikipedia), the position he held when he began his association with FishBase.