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John's first academic position was at the University of Malaya in Singapore (1951-1959), where he first became fascinated with sea turtles. Like his contemporary and correspondent Dr. Archie Carr, JRH was a talented observer of nature. He was a true classical field biologist. To this day I still tell my students that if you want to study one paper to help you understand both sea turtles as well as the methods of quality field research, then JRH's "The Green Sea Turtle, Chelonia mydas (Linn) in Malaya and Sarawak" is required reading (Hendrickson 1958). This paper includes extensive field notes on nesting and mating behavior, clutch development, hatchling dispersal, predation, breeding intervals, tagging and thermal biology, just to list a few. The paper also documents and shows amazing sensitivity to local Muslim cultural practices as they relate to conservation and utilization of this "the most valuable reptile in the world" as JRH liked to quote Archie Carr from his seminal "Handbook of Turtles". The other thing I tell my students is that if you can not think of a project, go read Hendrickson's publications, as they are chocked full of observations and "new ideas" that still need testing.

From Singapore, JRH moved to Kuala Lumpur in 1959, having been appointed first Professor and Chair of Zoology at the newly created University of Malaya in the Federation of Malaya (a country from 1957-1963). He helped design the buildings and planned the new department from the beginning. By this time he had shown an amazing diversity of research interests with publications on hummingbirds, commensal hydroids, tree shrews, bats, otters, Peripatus, frogs, leatherbacks and the new field of mariculture. In 1963 just prior to the formation of the new country of Malaysia, the Hendricksons (there were now four F-1s) left Malaya so that JRH could assume the position of first Vice-Chancellor for Student Interchange at the University of Hawaii's renowned East-West Center. This full time "Administrative" position lasted from 1963-1967 and was followed by two years in mariculture development as Director of the Oceanic Institute in Waimanalo, Hawaii. By this time, JRH confided to me many years later, he had pretty much "had it" with administrative jobs and wanted back in the lab and the classroom. As a consequence, in 1969, he moved back to the U. of Arizona where he assumed a professorship and Director of the Marine Biology Program (working primarily in Mexico's Gulf of California). There he trained students who worked on the endangered totoaba fish, the blue crab, oceanography of the Gulf of California, the endangered Bolson tortoise in addition to various sea turtle projects.

In particular, a young Mexican biologist named Rene Marquez was really struggling in the early 1970s to obtain additional protection for the beach at Rancho Nuevo where the remnant population of Kemp's ridleys was still nesting. Working with Jack Woody of the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Defenders of Wildlife, JRH secured grants to purchase and send some Jeeps to that important beach in the western Gulf of Mexico. Jim Wood, one of Hendrickson's young Ph.D. students from Amarillo, Texas, delivered those Jeeps to Rancho Nuevo where Rene and his collaborator P.C.H. Pritchard put them to good use. In 1973 JRH wrote a popular article "In Defense of Mexican Sea Turtles" which appeared in Defenders of Wildlife News and was surely important in convincing Woody with the help of Archie Carr to get the US involved in an elaborate scheme to bring this species back from the brink of extinction. In 1978 the joint conservation venture between Mexico, Texas, The National Park Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the US Fish and Wildlife Service finally got underway with thorough beach protection, and experiments in head starting and artificial imprinting as their thrusts.

In the mean time Hendrickson and many turtle biologists were becoming more and more alarmed at the precipitous declines in numbers of many of the world's sea turtle populations. Captive culture and captive breeding of sea turtles and the endangered scianid fish totoaba (Hendrickson 1979), on which JRH was also working, seemed to many of us at the time as if they might be essential strategies for saving these over harvested species. JRH had already prepared a working paper (Hendrickson 1971) on sea turtle captive nutrition for the IUCN Marine Turtle Specialist Group on which he served from 1968-1978, so when a group of American and English mariculture businessmen asked Hendrickson if he could help with some of their nutrition and reproduction problems, he was quick to agree, with the understanding that he was not interested in their money and they would provide animals and tanks for graduate student projects. The company was then called Mariculture Ltd. and their business was raising the green sea turtle in the Cayman Islands. He subsequently obtained grants from several organizations including the Janss foundation, USFWS and the NSF for his students to study sea turtle nutrition (J. Wood) and reproduction (D. Owens) with the turtle farmers.

In 1979 JRH was invited to prepare a general comparison of Sea Turtle life history strategies for a symposium at the American Society of Zoologist's meeting in Tampa, Florida (Hendrickson 1980). Despite his hating the assigned term "strategy" for his paper, this publication is probably his second most often cited work, as many turtle students have used his thoughts to both inspire and provide the "straw man" concepts for their own grants and publications. As an example, his provocative suggestion that oceanographic changes in the Gulf of Mexico during the Pleiocene might have resulted in a "gigantic "leak" of hatchling Kemp's ridleys into the Atlantic Gyre", caused a tremendous stir. He questioned, with tongue in cheek, if the hundreds of immature ridleys seen on the Atlantic coasts of the US and Europe were possibly "waifs, and reproductively speaking, "dead" to the species"? Several turtle students took issue with this suggestion and only a few years ago his trick finally worked and someone proved him wrong.

In the 1980s with the help of USFWS, JRH and Lupe put together a series of clever studies to try to develop a living tag for sea turtles in order, once and for all, to answer the question of natal beach fidelity. This was prior to the development of powerful genetic and micro tagging techniques. Anyway, with the Hendricksons' relatively simple surgical technique (Hendrickson & Hendrickson 1981), applied to hundreds of turtles, other researchers have now proven the technique to work on natural, head started and artificially imprinted turtles.

In 1988, Hendrickson, together with Rainer Zangerl and Mrs. Hendrickson, published his last sea turtle paper "A Redescription of the Australian Flatback Sea Turtle, Natator depressus" (Hendrickson 1988). Published at the same time as an article by Limpus and colleagues, the two excellent pieces of scholarship used very different data sets to prove together and convincingly that the flatback is indeed a distinct genus of sea turtle.

Upon his retirement JRH and Mrs. Hendrickson gave their extensive collection of sea turtle papers, compiled during 35 years of study, to the Archie Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research at the University of Florida. The Hendrickson family continues to be a family, refreshingly rich in tradition and love. JRH is survived by his wife Lupe, daughters Sharon, Leslie, and Carla, son Mark, two foster children Michael and Diane, nine grandchildren and three great grandchildren. Dr. Hendrickson wished to endow a scholarship fund for outstanding young naturalists in Malaysia, to encourage and promote excellence in the study of biological sciences by the youth of the country that gave him so much in his early career. Contributions may be sent to: The John R. Hendrickson Scholarship Fund, C/O The Malaysian United States Foundation, 226 Airport Parkway, Suite 480, San Jose, CA 95110 or for non-U.S. readers: The John R. Hendrickson Scholarship Fund c/o The Malaysian Nature Society, JKR 641, Jalan Kelantan, Bukit Persekutuan, 50480 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Hendrickson, J.R. 1954. Ecology and systematics of the salamanders of the genus Batrachoseps. University of California. Publications in Zoology 54:1- 46.

Hendrickson, J.R. 1958. The green sea turtle, Chelonia mydas (Linn.) In Malaya and Sarawak. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 130: 455-535.

Hendrickson, J.R 1979. Totoaba: Sacrifice in the Gulf of California - Letter to my Grandchildren. Oceans. 12: 14-18.

Hendrickson, J.R. 1971. Culture requirements of marine turtles - Dietary studies. IUCN Survival Service Commission, Marine Turtle Group, Agenda Paper CSS/MT 71/19.

Hendrickson, J.R. 1980. The ecological strategies of sea turtles. In: Symposium on the Behavioral and Reproductive Biology of Sea Turtles. American Zoologist 20:597-608.

Hendrickson, J.R. & L.P. Hendrickson 1981. A new method or marking sea turtles. Marine Turtle Newsletter 19:6-7.

Hendrickson, J.R. 1988. A redescription of the Australian flatback sea turtle. Natator depressus. (with Rainer Zangerl and L.P. Hendrickson). Bishop Museum bulletin in zoology I, new series. Publication 240 in the Bulletin Series. Bishop Museum Press. Honolulu.

David Owens, Director, Grice Marine Laboratory, College of Charleston, 205 Fort Johnson Road, Charleston, SC 29412, USA.
With special thanks to Mrs. Lupe Hendrickson for assistance with dates and geography.