Herndon Dowling Jr

Herndon Glenn Dowling Jr (born April 2, 1921 in Cullman; died 2015 in Talladega) was a noted herpetologist who pioneered systematic methods of distinguishing and relating snake species by counting scales, describing hemipenis morphology, and other quantitative methods. As an academic, he is recognized for expanding the scope and quality of field courses in biology at the University of Arkansas and at New York University.

Dowling was the son of school administrator Herndon Dowling Sr and his wife, Ada Camp Dowling. He attended public schools in Tuscaloosa, graduating in 1938. That summer he and some friends excavated a mosasaur skeleton from a chalk deposit. He published his findings in the Journal of the Alabama Academy of Sciences in 1941.

Dowling earned his bachelor's degree in biology at the University of Alabama in 1942 and enlisted as a private in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves. He was admitted to Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia and graduated as a lieutenant second class in March 1943. He married Margaret Purcell in Beaufort, South Carolina the same year.

Dowling trained in photographic reconnaissance in Washington D.C. before being sent to Guadalcanal in 1945. He participated in analysis of aerial photographs of Okinawa and made the suggestion to land the U.S. invasion force on the western side of the island. While assessing a bombed-out school he found an intact 1907 edition of Leonhard Stejneger's Herpetology of Japan and Adjacent Territory, which he picked up and used as a guide to the native snakes of the region. He proceeded to harvest venom from local pit vipers for medical research.

After the Japanese surrender, Dowling was sent to Tianjin, China on assignment to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he helped assess relations between Russian communism and Chinese communism. He spent another eight months as an OSS officer at Parris Island, South Carolina before earning his honorable discharge in 1946. He remained in the Marine Reserves until 1959, by which time he held the rank of Captain.

After World War II, Dowling enrolled at the University of Florida in Gainseville. He joined the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH) as a lifetime member while in college, and was twice honored with its Frederick H. Stoye Award for outstanding student work. He completed a master of science in zoology in 1948 with a dissertation on the Black swamp snake, advised by Arnold Grobman. He went on to study Mexican rat snakes for a summer on his way to completing a Ph.D. in zoogeography at the University of Michigan in 1951. His dissertation was completed under the direction of William Gosline.

That fall, Dowling began working with Emmett Reid Dunn at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and as a curatorial assistant for the extensive herpetological collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. After Dunn's death in 1956 Dowling helped to complete he final work. By then he spent two years teaching at the University of Virginia's Mountain Lake Biological Station in Pembroke and accepted a faculty appointment to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

During that year he opposed racial integration of the University and refused to comply with requirements to submit a list of organizations he had worked with and to take an oath of allegiance. His tenure was revoked and his contract was not renewed for 1959. He was made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that same year. During the ASIH annual meeting in San Diego, California he was encouraged to apply for the position of curator of reptiles at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. There he worked with University of Rhode Island herpetologist Vic Hutchison on a program to breed dusky tiger pythons. In 1960 Dowling joined a committee of the ASIH to describe North American species for the Catalog of American Amphibians and Reptiles (CAAR), a project funded by the National Science Foundation. He wrote the snake entries for the catalog, supported by the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles (SSAR), through 1973. He was elected a fellow of the New York Zoological Society in 1961, served one term as president of the Herpetologists' League in 1962–1963, and conducted research on giant tortoises on the Galapagos Islands in 1962. His later research on snakes and marine iguanas took him to Burma, India, Trinidad, St Lucia and Jamaica. Dowling joined the faculty of New York University as an adjunct professor in 1965. He was presented with the New York Herpetological Society Award in 1966.

In 1967 he left the zoo during a dispute over animal management and research. He was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to consolidate and publish records of amphibian and reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History. The five-year grant funding expired in 1972, but he completed the project, dubbed Herpetological Information Search Systems (HISS) in June 1973 with contributions from the museum and from herpetological societies. During the same period, Dowling edited the Herpetological Review journal, and the amphibian and reptile sections of Biological Abstracts. From 1968 until his retirement he edited entries on reptiles in the Encyclopedia Americana.

Dowling was promoted to associate professor at NYU in 1973 and to full professor in 1975. That year he introduced a new classification, the snake family of Pseudoxyrhophiidae, endemic to Madagascar. He also taught at the University of Rhode Island for 12 years. He retired from NYU in 1991 and settled near Talladega where his mother and sister were living. His research materials are held by the University of Western Connecticut as the Herndon Glenn Dowling Herpetological Collection.

Dowling and his first wife, Margaret, had four children before they divorced in 1962. He was subsequently married to New York Times editor Madlyn O'Neill in 1968. A year after he death in 2000 he married former student and textbook author Janann Jenner.

Publications

• Dowling, Herndon G. (1950) "Studies of the black swamp snake, Seminatrix pygaea (Cope), with descriptions of two new subspecies." Miscellaneous Publications No. 76. University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, pp. 1-38
• U.S. Department of the Navy, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery (1968) Poisonous Snakes of the World, A Manual for Use By U.S. Amphibious Forces. 2nd edition. (Herndon G. Dowling, ed. with Sherman A. Minton and Findlay Russell)
• "Herndon Glenn Dowling" (September 14, 2023) de.wikipedia.org - accessed November 21, 2023

References

• "Herndon Glenn Dowling Jr" (2008) American Men & Women of Science: A Biographical Directory of Today's Leaders in Physical, Biological, and Related Sciences. Gale ISBN 9781414432915
• Stewart, Margaret M. & Joseph C. Mitchell (2013) "Historical Perspectives: Herndon Glenn Dowling Jr." Copeia, No. 1, pp. 166–172
• Herbert Glenn Downing Jr obituary (2015) at usreyfuneralhome.com