[Coral-List] Jack Randall - ocean adventurer extraordinaire

Simon Pittman sjpittman at gmail.com
Fri May 1 14:01:55 UTC 2020


Hi everyone,
The sad news about our loss of the great Jack Randall caused me to reflect
on his contribution through fish id books that have been so helpful to many
of us in fish surveys in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, Pacific, Red Sea etc.
I emailed Jack back in 2008, or thereabouts, to ask if we could make use of
his 'monitoring' data from the US Virgin Islands from 1957-60 so that we
could do a then and now comparison and I think he told me off and said that
he had never 'monitored' anything in his life!! He did, however, keep
detailed notebooks of his observations.
I have long admired his remarkable adventures, discoveries of new species
and ability to continue SCUBA diving well beyond the age that we would
think safe to do so! and have referred to his work from the 1960s to inform
my own such as his pioneering work on fish movements and fish dietary
composition. If you would like to read more about his extraordinary life
then do read his short autobiographical account called Reminiscing by John
E. Randall

<https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/7769/00494.03.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y>

Excerpt from Reminiscing -*  "Our residence and marine lab on St. John was
visited in February, 1960 by the author, John Steinbeck. He wanted to try
scuba diving, so we put a tank on him in shallow water, but he did not do
well because his moustache caused his face mask to leak. I also dived on
several occasions with Clare Boothe Luce who was very good underwater; and
I introduced Laurence Rockefeller to snorkelling after getting a
prescription face mask for him. He donated the land on St. John to the U.S.
for our 29th national park. During the third and final year in the Virgin
Islands, John Lewis, the Superintendent of the Virgin Islands National
Park, asked if I would survey Buck Island off St. Croix because he had
heard glowing reports of the beauty of its reef and marine life. I was
skeptical that it would be any better than the reefs of St. John, but I was
wrong. I made a film of the island with Bob Schroeder's help that included
underwater scenes, a green turtle layings its eggs, nesting sea birds, and
aerial shots from a helicopter. The film went to the Department of the
Interior, and not long thereafter the island was proclaimed Buck Island
Reef National Monument by President Kennedy." *

https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/7769/00494.03.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y



Through my own time living and working in the USVI with NOAA, University of
the VI and the National Park Service, we discovered that Jack had made this
film and with the help of Alan Friedlander who managed to track it down to
a film canister in a dark corner of a freezer in the Bishop Museum had it
copied to DVD with Jack's permission. This film, it was rumoured, had
persuaded President Kennedy to proclaim the area as Buck Island Reef
National Monument in 1961. I don't think this film is available anywhere
else so I have uploaded 15 minutes of it onto Youtube. It doesn't have
sound but is color and features a young Jack every now and then swimming
over healthy fish-filled coral reefs with a hammer.  Be warned though that
towards the end he performs a dissection of a spotted eagle ray on board a
little boat. This may not be expected so I thought it only fair to point
out the gruesome bit.


The film is available here:  https://youtu.be/2gnynv5to7Q

Enjoy. Stay safe.

Simon

-- 
Simon J. Pittman, Ph.D., FRGS
Marine Ecologist
Director of Seascape Analytics Ltd (Plymouth, UK)
www.seascapeecology.com
Twitter @SeascapeEcology <https://twitter.com/SeascapeEcology>

- Founder of Ocean Cities Network Twitter @UrbanBlue7
<https://twitter.com/UrbanBlue7?lang=en-gb>
- Affiliate Faculty: Dept. Fisheries & Wildlife, Oregon State University,
USA and University of the Virgin Islands
- Science Council for Blue Parks, Marine Conservation Institute
- Member of IUCN WCPA Marine Connectivity Conservation Specialist Group
- Academic Editor for PLOS ONE
- Section Editor for Sustainability



<https://www.amazon.com/Seascape-Ecology-Simon-J-Pittman/dp/1119084431>


More information about the Coral-List mailing list