In 1976, Stephen Stearns published a paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology that reviewed and organized the theoretical ideas, available at the time, about the evolution of life-histories, and provided a vision for future research in this area. This paper, which went on to become a 'classic' in...
Evolution
Revisiting Weir et al. 2002
In a study published in Science in 2002, Alex Weir, Jackie Chappell and Alex Kacelnik demonstrated that New Caledonian crows can bend wires into the shape of hooks to access food. This study was probably the first report of an animal purposefully modifying an object to use as a tool. Fifteen years...
Revisiting Hill 1991
In 1991, Geoffrey Hill published a paper in Nature describing the results of his field experiments with house finches which showed that: 1. females choose to mate with brightly-coloured males; 2. males with brightly-coloured plumages tended to contribute more to parental care and were also likely...
Revisiting Schluter and McPhail 1992
In 1992, Dolph Schluter and Don McPhail published a paper in The American Naturalist in which they provide evidence for ecological character displacement among species of stickleback fish that live in the lakes of coastal British Columbia. In the paper, Schluter and McPhail also provide a...
Revisiting Milinski and Bakker 1990
In 1990, Manfred Milinski and Theo Bakker published a paper in Nature providing experimental evidence in support of the Hamilton-Zuk hypothesis. Milinski and Bakker showed, through experiments on three-spined stickleback, that: 1. the intensity of a male's red color is correlated with his physical...
Revisiting Loreau and Hector 2001
In a 2001 paper in Nature, Michel Loreau and Andy Hector described a new method, based on the Price equation, to partition the "selection effect" and the "complementarity effect" of biodiversity on ecosystem function, and demonstrated its use on data from the BIODEPTH experiments (BIODiversity...
Revisiting Clutton-Brock and Harvey 1977
In 1977, Tim Clutton-Brock and Paul Harvey published a paper in the Journal of Zoology reporting the results of their comparative analysis of the ecology and social organization of 100 primate species. This study was probably the first to statistically account for the non-independence of data as a...
Revisiting Coley 1983
In 1983, Phyllis Coley published a paper in Ecological Monographs reporting the results of her survey of herbivory and defense traits of rainforest tree species on the Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama. Based on the findings of her survey, Coley proposed a new model for the evolution of plant...
Revisiting Bonner 1947
In 1947, John Tyler Bonner published a paper in the Journal of Experimental Zoology presenting results of his experiments that suggested that a form of "chemotaxis" was the mechanism underlying aggregation of cells in slime molds . Sixty-nine years after the paper was published, I asked John...
Revisiting Davies 1978
In the summer of 1976, having just completed his PhD from Oxford and with some time to spare before his next job, Nick Davies decided to do a short study of speckled wood butterflies in Wytham Woods, where he was living at the time. Davies observed that male speckled woods seemed to defend...