In a paper published in The American Naturalist in 1972, Joan Roughgarden presented a model to predict the course of evolution in a population containing individuals of different types of ecological specialization and put it to test using field data on a species of Anolis lizard collected by Tom...
Evolution
Revisiting Clutton-Brock and Albon 1979
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...
Revisiting West and King 1988
In a paper published in Nature in 1988, Meredith West and Andrew King demonstrated that that a wing stroke visual display by female cowbirds, which don't sing, plays a role in song learning of male cowbirds. The findings of the study provided evidence for the role of visual stimulation in song...
Revisiting Gillespie 2004
In a paper published in Science in 2004, Rosemary Gillespie demonstrated that both dispersal and in situ speciation contribute to accumulation of species numbers of Tetragnathid spiders on Hawaiian islands. Moreover, accumulation, whether through dispersal or speciation, happens in a way that no...
Revisiting O’Brien et al. 1983
In a paper published in Science in 1983, Stephen O'Brien, David Wildt, David Goldman, Carl Merril and Mitchell Bush showed that the cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) had extremely low levels of genetic diversity, a pattern that they interpreted as resulting from a population bottleneck. This study was...
Revisiting Eldredge and Gould 1972
In a landmark chapter published in 1972 in a book called Models in Paleobiology, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould proposed, based on their observations of the fossil record, that evolution proceeds in short bursts of change separated by long periods of stasis, a theory they called "Punctuated...
Revisiting Komdeur et al. 1997
In a paper published in Nature in 1997, Jan Komdeur, Serge Daan, Joost Tinbergen and Christa Mateman showed, through a combination of observation, experiment and genetic analysis, that, in the endemic and endangered Seychelles warbler, parents can manipulate sex ratio adaptively to improve their...
Revisiting Kokko et al. 2002
In a paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London London B, Hanna Kokko, Robert Brooks, John McNamara and Alasdair Houston integrated 'Fisherian' and 'good genes' ideas into a general model of female mate choice for indirect benefits. Fourteen years after the paper was published I...
Revisiting Hubbell 1997
The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography, published as a monograph in 2001, by Stephen Hubbell, is considered one of the most important recent developments in Ecology. What is, probably, less well-known is that the ideas in the book were originally laid out in a paper published...
Revisiting Bolnick et al. 2003
In a paper published in The American Naturalist in 2003, Daniel Bolnick, Richard Svanbäck, James A. Fordyce, Louie Yang, Jeremy Davis, Darrin Hulsey and Matthew Forister reviewed studies that examined individual specialization on resource use and quantified how much inter-individual variation...