In a paper published in Behaviour in 1979, Tim Clutton-Brock and Steve Albon showed, using observations and playback experiments, that red deer stags use roaring contests to assess each other’s fighting abilities when there aren’t any obvious size discrepancies. Twenty-seven years after the paper was published, I spoke to Tim Clutton-Brock (with inputs from Steve Albon) about his motivation to do this piece of work, his memories of field work and what we have learnt since about the ‘roaring of red deer’.
Citation: Clutton-Brock, T. H., & Albon, S. D. (1979). The roaring of red deer and the evolution of honest advertisement. Behaviour, 69(3-4), 145-170.
Date of interview: 4th October 2016 (via Skype)
Hari Sridhar: I want to start by asking you what the specific motivation was to do this piece of work at this point in time. I realized that you had been working on red deer for about four years at this point. What was the motivation for this piece of work was in relation to earlier work on this species?
Tim Clutton-Brock: Yeah, well, I think we’d been working on male competition over that whole period. At the same time – I was based in Sussex then – John Maynard Smith was working on game theoretical measures of animal contest, which eventually produced his paper his paper in 74 on the logic of animal conflict. And it is quite clear from our work that red deer fought quite frequently, and the fights were dangerous, both in terms of injury and occasionally in terms of death. And, that it was in the interest of stags to avoid fighting whenever possible. And so, stags spend much of their time roaring at each other. They roar at high rates throughout the day and throughout the night during the rut. And we became interested in whether these repeated vocalizations allowed them to assess their rivals, and so to avoid fighting.
HS: Stepping back a bit, how did you first get interested in red deer? Your PhD was on primates. How did you get interested in this new system?
TC: Yeah, well, I worked in Tanzania and Uganda during my thesis on Colobus monkeys. And, while they were very interesting, the problem was that they live in the canopy, between 70 and 120 foot above your head. Your capacity to recognize individuals is quite limited. Your capacity to collect biological material from them is quite limited. Your capacity to measure food availability is quite limited. And having spent three years working on this, I wanted both to, for my next project, be placed in the UK rather than overseas, and I wanted a more tractable species where one could actually get access to the animals, where one could ideally collect biological material for individuals, where you could measure the food supply, and where you could follow the survival of individuals throughout their life. And that immediately made me realize that really one wanted a terrestrial species, and you wanted a terrestrial species that was visible and lived in a habitat where you could actually see what was going on. And red deer in Scotland live in open environments. I’d had experienced them previously when I worked for Roger Short taking a film of his work on the reproductive physiology of red deer. So, I knew about it. And red deer are one of the principal grazing species throughout much of the highlands of Scotland, so there’s an economic interest in them.And all of those made me realize the red deer were a good animal to work on. Fraser Darling had worked on them in the 30s, producing a brief description of their social organization and social behavior, but there had been no systematic work on their social behavior, on the structure of populations since then. Well, there has been no work on their social behavior. There has been work on their demography by Pat Lowe, and by Brian Mitchell, Brian Staines and Nigel Charles on their reproduction and feeding ecology, but very little work on red deer societies or on detailed aspects of social behavior and reproductive competition. And so red deer seemed to me like a good species to pick at this time. And beyond that, I knew that Roger Short, who had worked on red deer with Gerald Lincoln and John Fletcher and Fiona Guinness on the Isle of Rum, was moving in other directions. He was going to work on humans and moving to Australia. And so, there was room to take over the existing study area, and with quite a number of recognizable individuals that Fiona Guinness had learned to distinguish. And so, I was able to step into that, when Roger Short left to go to Australia and take over an existing study area with a substantial number of individuals that were already recognizable.
HS: At what stage in your career were you when you started this work?
TC: This was my first postdoc. I finished up my Colobus work in 1972 and I started this in 1973.
HS: This paper has a second author: SD Albon. How did the two of you come together and what did each of you bring to this work?
TC: At quite an early stage I got a Natural Environment Research Council grant, which carried an assistantship on it to help me work on the red deer, because we were having to monitor the survival and breeding success and behavior of several hundred individuals, which was beyond something that any single individual could do. And Steve Albon came to join me, initially, as a graduate research assistant, and he continued with me for more than 15 years, doing a PhD and then working as a postdoc. So I was very fortunate in having someone who was an excellent field worker, and who worked with me for quite a long period of time.
HS: In the paper, you say that the data for this particular project was collected between 74 and 77 over four breeding seasons. Could you give us a sense of fieldwork at that point in time, which I’m guessing was very different from how fieldwork is done now? What was your daily routine?
TC: Well, it wasn’t that dissimilar. I mean, field work still today is based, in these sorts of studies, involves quantitative records, regular samples of the observations of particular individuals, and quantitative records of their activities, in this case, the frequency of roaring, the frequency of fighting, the timing of birth, and so on. The difference is that it was all collected either on tape recorders or on check sheets in the field. So one didn’t have tablets or handheld computers, so that one had to either collect it on tape recorders and then transfer it to paper later on, or one had to collect it with check sheets in the field, both of which we did. But the kind of data that we were collecting is really not very dissimilar from the kind of data that you would collect today. We did a certain amount on the detailed structure of roars, and there the techniques and the equipment that’s available have vastly improved. But we’re more interested in frequency of roaring rates on the outcome of different display encounters. And there, the data one was collecting isn’t very different from the kind of data that you collect today. I think the other thing to say is that from the start of the red deer project, we were working with 60 or 70 recognizable females and a roughly similar number of males. So, we were working quite extensively over an area of about 12 square kilometers with a considerable number of recognizable individuals. And that’s been the hallmark, really, of my work ever since. And the various studies that I’ve been involved with have all involved work on substantial numbers of recognizable individuals.
HS: Were the names for the red deer individuals given by earlier workers?
TC: Some of them were generated by Fiona Guinness, prior to 1973, and others we made up as we went along. I think the thing to realize with names is that if you’re working as a team on a pile of wild animals, you need to be able to communicate which individual you’re talking about at any one time. And referring to individuals either by names such as ‘Saggy’ or names which refer to tag colors, such as red-green-left or something like that, is much easier and much quicker than referring to them by numbers; you know, stag number 296. It’s very easy to forget numbers. It’s less easy to remember large numbers of numbers. So, I think giving names to individual animals is not really anything that anyone should bother about. I don’t think it’s anthropocentric. It’s an easy technique of remembering who’s who.
HS: You mentioned tape recordings earlier and in the paper you talk about some films you made. Are recordings and films still available? Do you still use them?
TC: I made an original 16 millimeter film for Roger Short; I think it was in 1968. So, it maybe references to that. Otherwise the BBC Horizon series screened a documentary film about our work on the Red Deer by Peter Jones in December 1978, of which I still do have a copy.
HS: There are a few photographs in the paper. In the first photo, there’s a person who seems to bedoing some playback experiments, I think.
TC: Yes, that’s Steve Albon. And we were, originally, doing playback experiments with a variety of audio equipment. I don’t know which photograph you’re talking about, but sometimes we used a public-address horn speaker, sometimes we used a whacking great cabinet speaker, of the sort you had at a rock concert. So, we were carrying these around the field. Well, that’s another area where things have improved. In order to get decent quality, we were having to carry big speakers, big amplifiers, and whopping great car batteries or lorry batteries to power them. So it was quite a major business. And I think, today, one would be able to get much better playback with much lighter hand-held equipment using lithium-ion battery technology.
HS: Were both Steve and you in the field during most of the sampling? Were you staying on the Isle of Rum?
TC: We were staying on the Isle of Rum. During the first two years of the project, I was spending nearly half the year on Rum. And then later, from 74 on when I got my first university position, I wasn’t able to do that any longer. But I think the thing to realize for red deer is that they have a relatively short and highly predictable breeding season in September and October. And so, for the work on rutting it wasn’t necessary to spend terribly long there.One could go up in mid-September, and come back at the end of October and you would have covered the rut.
HS: Were the figures in this paper hand-drawn?
TC: Oh yes. At that stage the normal thing was either to make them with a Rotring-ink drawing pen, ruler and a series of plastic stencils with letters and numbers that you could trace. And then that led subsequently to the use of sheets of transfer. So, you could buy sheets of transfers of either letters or numbers, and those started to look a bit smarter. But there’s no comparison with what one could do now. Now, it’s wonderful to be able to produce letters or figures or what have you by all the software packages that are available. I should say, when one was doing this, much of the analysis was done by hand as well. In the later stages of the work, we were doing all our statistical tests by computer.But quite a bit of this stage, when we were working in the early 70s, the tests were basically done with a calculator, manually. So, I was always very fond of using Siegel’s Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences, and that told you how to work out the specific tests – Spearman rank correlations, Mann Whitney test and so on. And we would do this by hand with a calculator.
HS: Would you remember how long the writing of the paper took, and where and when you did most of the writing?
TC: No, I don’t. I mean, over that time, I was commonly writing, either, in Sussex or in Cambridge, where I was working. But I was spending quite a bit of time in Rum and I was commonly drafting up there too. So, I don’t actually remember where, exactly, where and when I wrote that. But I’ve always been very keen to try and make papers tightly organized, as clear as possible and as simple as possible. Whether I did that, in that case, is for you to judge rather than me, but I habitually spend an awful lot of time trying to make papers simple, clear and readable.
HS: This is a really nice paper to read. This is not an area of research that I’m very familiar with but I found it very easy to read.
TC: Good. Thank you for saying that. That’s very much what I try to achieve and I spend quite a lot of time and effort doing that.
HS: Was Albon also involved at the writing stage?
TC: Yes, absolutely, he was involved. I would probably have done most of the drafting and we’d have then thrown it to and fro between us.
HS: I would like to go over the list of Acknowledgements to get a sense of how you knew these people and how they helped. The first person you mention is Fiona Guinness.
TC: Fiona Guinness joined me when I started the study. She’d worked previously for or with Roger Short, and she learned to recognize all the hinds and most of the stags in part of Rum. And it was Fiona who taught me to recognize the individual deer and Fiona continued to work on Rum over that period, following individuals through and maintaining the long-term records of breeding success and survival and behavior for the whole population. And Steve and I were building on that and using that information, to some extent, in our detailed studies of fighting behavior and vocalization.
HS: Robert Gibson.
TC: Robert Gibson was a student jointly supervised by John Maynard Smith and myself, who was working on social behavior of stags outside the breeding season, and dominance and so on. So he was working over part of that period on the Isle of Rum with us, and he was collecting some data that was relevant to us, but he was really himself working on the maintenance of dominance hierarchies outside the rut.
HS: And then you thank three people who helped with the collection of 24-hour data. First is Michael Appleby. Was he also student?
TC: He was a volunteer at that time. Mike Appleby subsequently did a PhD project with me on the red deer. I think, at that stage, he hadn’t started it yet, but I can’t quite remember whether that was the case. Mike Appleby went on to be an academic and is still working principally on domestic species. Just give me the names of the others.
HS: Ben Osborne and Dr. Norman Owen-Smith.
TC: Ben Osborne was again a graduate helper. And he came to work with me because we wanted to see what the deer does at night, and to carry out 24 hour observations on their activity over the period.And that was a quite lengthy thing. In October, it can be quite bad weather; you need enough people.We were breaking up the day between four of us. And we were collecting data at other times. Norman Owen-Smith was a South African researcher who was actually working on Kudu – similar species, similar ruts – and he was coming to join us for a reproductive season on Rum, in order to be able to compare the behavior of red deer with the behavior of Kudu.
HS: Then you thank four people for technical advice: Dennis Unwin, Garreth Millward, Bruce Galloway and Alex Garner.
TC: I’m not too sure. Yeah, but I think they were all people who were giving us advice on how we do playbacks. We had to find the right speakers and the right apparatus to do playbacks of stags. And initially we knew nothing about it. And I think those were all people who helped us in one way or another to set up the equipment that we were using in playbacks.
HS: You thank two companies and the BBC for equipment…
TC: It is all to do with trying to set up playbacks, because it was very important to get effectively enough bass.And red deer are quite big animals. And they really didn’t respond too well to tinny playback that didn’t sound natural at all. Because you’ve got to broadcast at quite high volume, you’ve got to broadcast enough bass and in a convincing fashion. And those were companies that again helped us with the playback techniques.
HS: And then there are a few people you thank for valuable discussion. The first of that is Brian Bertram.
TC: Brian Betram was a colleague. At that time, he worked on ostriches and lions and fighting fish. He was based in Cambridge. He was a senior postdoc at that time, and I think he read the manuscript and we discussed aspects of the work with him.
HS: Richard Dawkins.
TC: Richard Dawkins, I’ve known since Oxford days. And I forget when I discussed it with Richard, but I must have discussed what we were doing with Richard at some stage. He’s obviously by this time based in Oxford. I was myself in the same group in Oxford for a short while; so I got to know them then. He moved out progressively to work as he did very successfully on wonderful popular books, moving out of direct empirical work, but he’s someone I’ve kept contact with ever since.
HS: Paul Harvey.
TC: Paul Harvey was a colleague at University of Sussex where I was during most of this time.And Paul and I were working quite extensively on other totally unrelated things. We were working on the distribution of social behavior across primates, and the structure of primate societies. And I must have discussed the work we were doing on red deer with him too.
HS: JR Krebs.
TC: John Krebs is another person of the same generation, who I got to know at Oxford. And he was working on communication at the time, mostly on great tits and blue tits.And I would have discussed the work we were doing with him at some stage as well.
HS: John Maynard Smith.
TC: John Maynard Smith was professor at Sussex while I was there. So, John Maynard Smith and Paul Harvey and I, and Brian Charlesworth and various other people used to meet regularly for lunch,to discuss the work we were doing. And so, during the three years I was at Sussex, both John Maynard Smith and Paul were people that I saw regularly and had regular exchanges and discussions with, which were great fun, because both of them were interested. Both John and Paul were originally population geneticists and they came from a different background from me. So, I had much to learn from them. And I found it very stimulating, discussing the work we were doing with them.
HS: Dafila Scott
TC: Dafila Scott during part of this time was my girlfriend and subsequently became my wife. She, at this stage, was a zoologist working on the evolution of parental care in wildfowl.
HS: Richard Wrangham
TC: Richard Wrangham was a colleague from Cambridge, works on the origin of mammal societies, particularly primate societies,and was based in the same Sociobiology research group that I was in, when I moved back to Cambridge from Sussex, over this period.
I think one of the interesting things from going through this is just how many of these people have been immensely productive and are still in the field. So, I mean, I don’t know, you’re aware … do you know all these names?
HS: Yes, most of them.
TC: Okay. Almost all of these are people who are really quite well known, or extremely well known, who made a major contribution to the field. So, I think I was tremendously lucky in the people I was dealing with, and I was fortunate in having access to such an amazing collection of people.
HS: Did this paper have a relatively smooth ride through peer review? Was Behaviour the first place you submitted this to?
TC: I think so. I honestly don’t remember the details of that. So, I think it got accepted more or less straight away. We had sent a similar paper to Animal Behaviour. I don’t remember why I sent it to Behaviour at that stage. Today, Behaviour is a less important journal, I think, than it was then. So, there wasn’t the same emphasis at that stage on the impact factor of journals and so on. I have a vague memory that actually the reason I sent it to Behaviour was that Behaviour was prepared to publish photographs and Animal Behaviour wasn’t. And I wanted to incorporate photographs. I maybe wrong; this is a long time ago, but I have a really good memory. The reason for sending it to Behaviour was connected with the wish to include photographs in the text,
HS: And the photos add so much value to the paper…
TC: I think they show you what it’s like. And it’s actually quite difficult to get a real idea of what it’s like doing play back to red deer on the Scottish hillside without some photographs. I don’t know whether you’ve seen but I recently produced a synthetic book on mammal societies, which synthesizes much of what we know about the social behavior of mammals. And that is quite extensively illustrated with pictures of red deer going back to that period, as well as pictures of a wide variety of other species. But my impression of it is that including pictures in academic text gives a reality to what was done that you don’t get if you just include words.
HS: At the time when the paper was published, did it attract a lot of attention?
TC: Yea, it attracted quite a bit of attention. Because, at that stage, there was starting to be interest in functional aspects of communication, but the ideas weren’t really extended. That, as far as I know, was the origin of the idea of honest advertisement. It was coming out about the same time that Amotz Zahavi was producing ideas about the Handicap Principle and about functional mechanisms that maintained the accuracy and credibility of animal signals. So, there was interest from other people in this area – Nick Davies and Tim Halliday were working on toads. And so, the work was in an area which was starting to be of considerable interest at the time.And, I think that one of the reasons it attracted that attention was because really it was one of the first studies, certainly one of the first studies on mammals, to do this, to focus on why it was the case that animals should give repetitive signals. And there was a difference between what I was suggesting…so, I was suggesting that, in practice, the capacity of stags to give repeated roars and to roar loudly was closely related to their actual physical condition,so that if you were weak or exhausted, you couldn’t continue to roar as they do multiple times a minute throughout the 24 hours. So that the reason why roaring was honest was that there was a constraint involved. The capacity to roar like that was constrained by the animal’s condition. And its muscle condition and so on, which was essentially a different explanation from Amotz Zahavi’s Handicap Principle, where he suggested that animals should communicate in ways where there was a real fitness cost to it. So,my argument was the idea of the credibility of roaring accuracy of the signal was really that it was related to a constraint.And I’m interested to see that the importance of constraints has continued to be recognized. And if anything, there has been more recently a move back to thinking about the maintenance of honest signals in this way, rather than the much more specialized model based on the Handicap Principle.
HS: In the paper you suggest that the decline in roaring could be because there are changes in hormone levels associated with declining body condition. Has that been worked on more? Or do we know more about that?
TC: I’ve not done more about that. But we knew at the time that the animals’ testosterone levels peaked just before the rut and decline gradually during the rut and then takes really quite a sharp decline when they go out of rut and they leave the females and go back to their groups. Much of what was known about testosterone at that time came from the lovely work of Gerald Lincoln‘s on the relationship between testosterone level and the seasonal changes in physiology, including the changes in the structure of the larynx, which are associated with roaring. So, it was clear that there were hormonal mechanisms involved. There hasn’t, to my knowledge, been a great deal of additional work on the specific relationships, the detailed relationships, between roaring and hormone levels. But it is very significant that the stags, during the early stages of the rut when they’re competing intensely, the roars are fullest and strongest and most frequent, and then, as they become exhausted – because they don’t feed during the period of the rut – their roars become less loud and less frequent. And then, suddenly, when they’re finally defeated in a fight and they quit their harems and go back to grazing with other stags, their roaring rates drop entirely away, and they don’t do it. So that, of course, means you would expect to be seeing a change in testosterone over that time, so that it’s, I think, very reasonable to think that there’s a close association between testosterone and roaring.
HS: You also suggest that fighting ability could be related to hormones.
TC: Fighting ability in red deer is based on your capacity to push your rival, so they lock antlers and then they push each other to and fro. And that, obviously, is related to your strength and your muscle condition too. So, what I was suggesting was, that both roaring and ultimately fighting are inevitably related to your strength and muscle conditioning.
HS: Today, it’s 37 years since this paper was published.Would you say that the main conclusions from this paper hold true still more or less? You say that roaring may permit competing stags to assess each other’s fighting abilities.
TC: Yes, I think that’s right.I think that’s the main takeaway, but I think associated with that is the idea, which was novel at the time, that this was a consequence of inevitable correlations between the capacity to roar and your muscle condition and strength. So, it’s not purely just an observational paper that suggests that animals are competing by roaring. It’s also associated with ideas as to why this should be the case. And I would think that both of those hold.
HS: You say that exactly what aspect of roaring is used as the basis of assessment is not clear, i.e. whether it’s the mean roaring rate or the maximum rate or the average roars per bout.Do we know more about that now?
TC: We know a bit more about that. So, we know a bit more about the relationship between the breeding success of males and the actual structure of roars. So the structure of roars is related to the condition of males and, in particular, the aspect that they appear to be taking notes of performance, which are complexities in the structure of the roaring itself. So, it’s not necessarily just the depth of the roar, it’s the tonal quality of the roar, if you like, as well. There’s quite a technical literature relating to that. And there’s been work by Karen McComb, who worked with me initially, and her colleagues at Sussex, who have explored variation in the structure of roars, the tonal structure of roars, and the depths of roars and so on, and the extent to which both other males and females respond to roles. So, that whole area, including work by David Reby, generated quite extensive work, which explored the variation in the structure of roars and correlations between the structure of roars and the responses of males, from the responses are females. So, I think that was a very productive field, and that I think was originally generated by our work on the frequency of roaring.
HS: And you also say that males might be using cues other than the vocal cues to assess competitors, for example, olfactory cues…
TC: Very likely. They thrash the vegetation, they urinate copiously, they wallow, they go into parallel walks, which display their body size and condition to their rivals. So I suspect that both olfactory communication and visual communication are involved too.
HS: Towards the end of the paper you say, “We predict that further investigation of other species of large animals will reveal relationships between temporal variation and fighting ability, and aspects of display behavior”.
TC: That all came about too. Much of that work actually consists less of investigation of body size effects than of group size effects, so that, subsequently, there has been work on lions, on the capacity of individuals to recognize the number of individuals in a group that are vocalizing at a time. Lions and hyenas and howler monkeys, a number of other species, where they’ve looked at the extent to which it’s possible to tell the number of individuals in a social group defending a territory, in some cases, from the vocalizations that are given and using similar playback experiments to ours, they’ve shown that individuals adjust their responses, whether they approach to attack or whether they run away, to the relative size of the groups involved, relative to the size of group that they’re in. So that’s moving away from the relationships between individuals strength and vocalization, of the kind that we were talking about, to extend that to looking at the relationships between the characteristics of groups – the size of groups, in a sense the fighting power of groups – and the vocalizations they’re producing. So that’s similar work, which I don’t want to say developed out of ours, but that’s all working in the same direction as ours.
HS: If you were to redo this study would you change anything, given the advances in technology and theory and statistical techniques?
TC:Oh, I think if I did it today, I will record all the roars given. Instead of just counting roars, I think I’d be going in for looking at qualitative aspects of the roars during the roaring exchanges. And I would be using computer-based techniques to identify changes in roar structure during roaring interactions, which would have given a totally new perspective on that.But that would have been impossibly time consuming with the methods that were available to looking at the structure of vocalizations at that stage. Now, it would be okay because you could get the computer to run through thousands of roars and parameterize them, But at that stage, there was nothing like that.
HS: Do you continue to work on this system even today?
TC: I continue to have a hand. The red deer study itself on the Island of Rum is still going, we’re still maintaining the records of individual breeding success and survival, and the factors that affect it, both the environmental factors and the genetic factors.But I handed over that to my colleagues at Edinburgh, who originally worked with me – Josephine Pemberton and Loeske Kruuk. And they now run the red deer study, which focuses to a greater extent on genetic factors affecting individual breeding success and survival. And I moved off and I worked on a variety of other systems including lek breeding in antelope and deer. And then, since 93, I’ve been working on mongooses, in particular meerkats, and with students, I’ve worked for a while on banded mongooses. But I run a long-term study of meerkats in the Kalahari and, again, working on communication there, but mostly working there, in fact, on reproductive behavior,and in particular, evolution of cooperation, though, aspects of the communication of that study have been developed by Marta Manser, who was originally a student, and then a postdoc of mine, and is now a professor in Zurich, working both on meerkats and Damaraland mole-rats, and working with people who are doing work on communication rather than doing the work oncommunication myself.
HS: When was the last time you visited the Isle of Rum?
TC: I’ve visited Rum over the years, but I think I haven’t been there for about 10 years.
HS: Would you know if the island has changed a lot from the time you worked there for this project?
TC: No, I think it has changed very little. The human community has changed a bit, but the village is on the far side of the island. The study area and the study still continue in just the same way. Fiona Guinness still works on it for part of the year. And we still maintain the life histories of large samples of males and females in the same study area, as we’ve always done since 1971. So, that study has now been running for nearly 50 years, even though I am no longer the principal investigator running it.
HS: Has the number of deer remained more or less the same over this period?
TC: In the early days, in the seven years after 1973, the deer population rose, and then it’s been constant, on average, jerking up and down in relation to variation in weather. So, we’ve done quite extensive work on population demography and population dynamics, as well as on social behavior. And quite a wide range of papers published on the demography and dynamics of the population.
HS: This paper has now been cited over 700 times.Do you have a sense of what it mostly gets cited for?
TC: I think it’s one of the well-known examples of male vocal competition. It’s been widely cited in a lot of textbooks. So people pick it up… if you’re writing a paper and you want to say something about males competing by repeated vocalizations, this is one of the, sort of, simple and well-known examples that you might cite.
HS: Have you ever read the paper after it was published?
TC: Oh yes, I’ve read it at various times. I’ve never sat down and read it right through. Papers that you’ve written as long ago as that, you forget precisely what’s in them and what you’ve said where; because I’ve published quite a lot of papers on red deer. So, when you’re doing synthetic work or writing books you revisit papers you’ve produced to remind yourself of what you said where.
HS: When you compare this paper to papers you write today do you notice any striking differences in the way you write?
TC: In the way I write, I hope not. I think in the way I write, I’ve always worked hard to keep them simple and clear. I don’t think I’ve always succeeded, but I’ve always tried to do that. And I think, you know, I’m heartened by the fact that you found that paper relatively easy to read, and I hope most of my papers were relatively easy to read.
HS: Would you count this as one of your favorites among all the papers you’ve written?
TC: Oh, yes. Looking back, quite a lot of papers you think they were terribly boring,or they’re now totally out of date. Or that they weren’t very novel. I think that that was one of the papers that I’ve written that actually caught the crest of the wave. And yes, it’s a paper I’m proud of.
HS: What would you say to a student who was about to read this paper today? what should he or she take away from it? And would you add any caveats?
TC: I think the message of the paper is that vocalization signals have to be credible, and one of the ways in which they can be credible, can be believable, can be honest, is through an inevitable relationship to characteristics such as size or strength. So, I think that’s the academic message of it. I suppose there’s another message. You can do interesting things with very basic equipment.And we were using very basic equipment at that stage.And I think there’s a final thing, which is, I think, an important message. You want to avoid, in science, following the trend too much.You want to avoid producing repetitive studies of questions, repetitive investigations of questions that are topical and fashionable. Because it’s most unlikely if you do that, that your work will have a high novelty. So I think there’s a general message that you can do quite simple things. And there’s a real benefit to any young scientist in asking questions that are as novel was possible, and in stepping out into the unknown.
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