1926-2020
It is with great sadness that I have to report the passing of John A. Allen at the age of 94, after a number of years of increasing frailty.
For the deep-sea community, he will be remembered most for his great series of studies on the bathyal and abyssal Bivalvia from the oligotrophic deep Atlantic. He first published on deep-sea bivalves with Howard Sanders of Woods Hole in 1966, and with Howard and a number of research assistants and Ph.D students, he completed the entire bivalve fauna in 2008. JA, as we knew him, will be best remembered for his elegant anatomical drawings revealing adaptations to life in the abyss as well as confirming the great diversity of species in an apparently hostile environment. These observations led to Howard Sanders’ Stability-Time hypothesis.
JA introduced over 100 new nominal taxa, but at a time when molecular systematics were not available. He recognised unresolved issues, especially concerning the isolation of the Atlantic basins, the concepts of a cosmopolitan abyssal fauna and the interpretation of small differences in morphology. While there has been an explosion of interest in the enigmatic chemosynthetic communities, few have returned to study the diversity of the minute species brought to us by JA’s work.
In 2017, Fiona Hannah and I published a retrospective on JA’s contributions (see Oliver, P.G. & Hannah, F. 2017). The publications and new nominal taxa introduced by John. A. Allen. Journal of Conchology, 42: 257-266 download from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312579239
I would be happy to receive any recollections of JA that you may have: graham.oliver@museumwales.ac.uk.
From DSL15
