“I remember getting a large number of reprint request cards in the mail. You don’t see those any more, either. Oh yes, in the days before pdfs, we sent out things called reprints to people who requested them”

“I rough-drafted them, either by pencil and ruler on graph paper or by computer [...]. Then Cheryl Hughes, the Zoology Department artist at UW-Madison, rendered them in Indian ink on parchment. This was the common practice for scientific illustration at that time.”

“I think editors today might ask us to split it into three papers: one on egg mimicry, one on recognition errors and one on the absence of chick rejection. But I’m pleased that we put it all in one package, because I think comparing the eggs and the chicks in the same paper makes it more complete. Subsequent studies have done more detailed analysis of each of these topics. I’m also really grateful for the old style editors who allowed us to be chatty and put some long quotes from Darwin, Wallace and Aristotle. I think it’s lovely to pay tribute to these great naturalists. Lots of early cuckoo discoveries were really hard won, by Edgar Chance, for example. We’re so lucky to have this natural history to build on. As I said earlier, the hardest bit is doing the watching before you do the wondering.”

“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.”

“I think it is very difficult to think back what it was like before we had smart phones, or before there was PCR. Nowadays, everybody lives life as if we’ve always had smart phones or email or internet. And I think it is difficult for them to see what science was like 30 years ago. I know, because these methods aren’t used anymore, it’s hard for them to imagine that you can sequence DNA with radioactivity. Why would you do that? You can do it with fluorescence now. So, I view this a little bit as a lesson of how –Avery or Watson or Crick or whoever – how they worked in a generation or two before me, to try to imagine what that was like and what the data were like and how cumbersome it was to get only a little bit of new information. I think this is maybe a lesson in that, that it’s difficult to understand, from a young student’s perspective, in particular, how these kinds of technical advances really contributed to progress in science generally and to better understanding the patterns and processes that describe and shaped biological diversity on our planet.”

“I think it’s maybe hard for you to realise that, up until the ‘60s, animal people studied animals and plant people studied plants. Very few people tried to study the interactions between them because you had to learn two different worlds. Remember, we used to have botany departments and entomology departments and zoology departments. Three separate administrative castles. Each one of them with their own purpose, their own rules and own awards, their own students, their own budgets. When I was in the entomology department, it was viewed as not good if I went to seminars in the botany department!”

“I think that the bar to getting such a paper in a scientific journal is higher now, as it should be, given all of the complicating factors that have been studied since. I did that work in the early 80s. People worry much more about the size of the eggs, the scent of the eggs, the impact of having people check the nests, placement of the nests, as well they should.”

“I think the story itself was solid. The data were solid. Although the sequence data was just mitochondrial, I also had allozyme data which told a similar story in terms of evolutionary relationships. And allozyme data provide fairly good nuclear markers that at least give you more confidence than mitochondrial DNA alone. I mean, given what was available at the time, the data were really not bad at all. I mean if I did it now, of course, they’d say, “Oh, we want far more markers”, and allozymes went out with the dinosaurs! But it’s kind of silly that people abandoned allozymes, to be honest, because they were great markers and there was minimal fuss and bother. It was easy enough to just get them, and as long as you had enough of them they provided a pretty good indication of relationships.”

“I think the story might not be that different [if I were to redo this study today], but today our lab has a UPLC Mass Spec and advances in Metabolomics which allow one to bring a much more detailed view of secondary metabolites.”

“I think you would have to read it in a historical context, in the context of what was known at that time, and what were we trying to answer, that may be well-established now but that was not established then. What were the controversies at that time, what were the things we were trying to resolve, what was what were we doing, that was different than what had been done before? So, I think to think about things from the perspective of where we were coming from at that time. And then, why did it become influential, how did it change the way people were thinking about the problems we addressed and the subsequent direction of science since then? That would be an interesting thing to think about. But it’s very difficult to go back and think about how people saw things at that time and just the whole context. There was no Web of Science, there was no online access to papers, there was no email, there was no web, we didn’t have cell phones either. It’s hard to put yourself in that frame of mind, you know, how you would be thinking about problems and how you would be addressing and approaching things, when so many things were really different, were profoundly different about the way we were doing science,and certainly the way we were trying to make sense of scientific publications. Most importantly, a lot of the people reading this today weren’t even alive then, so it’s very hard to imagine how the world was before you are in it.”

“I was a very young and naive grad student when I sent that paper off to Nature. I just wrote it up and put it in the mail. (Yes, you still actually photocopied and mailed manuscripts in the early 1990s).”

“I was also sole author on my PhD papers, except for some I did together with a fellow student who was a theoretician. In those days supervisors didn’t put their names on student papers, and throughout my career I have also never put my name on students’ papers. I know the tradition has now changed.”

“I would say this paper was mostly catalyzed by one-on-one discussions followed by drafts and notes exchanged between us. Of course, we also had phone calls, but I think the physical presence of the three of us was necessary and important because we were struggling to crystallize what we meant. It really helped to be conversing, drawing all sorts of figures and conceptual frameworks on the board, and making a list of all the examples we knew about from the literature that may or may not be [ecosystem] engineering. At the same time, it wasn’t something where we could just get together for a couple of days and bang it out. I also don’t think it was very amenable to what today is a common way of writing papers – exchanging endless drafts among large groups of people and getting comments and feedback via email. Maybe it was representative of that era, but maybe it was also representative of the challenge. We knew what we wanted to do but we didn’t know exactly what that was. That meant there was a lot of iteration, going to and fro to try to crystallize it.”

“I wrote it longhand on lined tablet paper in pencil, then edited the longhand first draft and typed it up on an old electric typewriter I had scrounged from the Biology department office. It might have been the last paper I wrote that way. I think I got my first desktop computer right around that time, and would have switched to word processing then.”

“I’m pretty sure hand-drawn. Yeah, I did hand-draw [the graphs]. I hand-lettered too, with a Leroy lettering set.”

“If you want real change why don’t I take you back to ‘75 when I was working in Panama? Okay, so we had miracle inventions but we didn’t have Ziploc bags then. We didn’t have cable ties. We didn’t have Vexar. We had to work with hardware cloth and chicken wire that tear up your hands underwater. There were so many things we didn’t have, but we did have write-in-the-rain notebooks and we had these wonderful Casio watches which I still use. You probably use these too for your behavioural work. They cost $13 and they’ve got a stop watch, a timer. All these wonderful things. I remember those things just come out. And then the mosquito repellent would eat them, so I learnt not to use mosquito repellent. Just all these little technologies. Now leaping forward to 1990, which skips work in the 80s. I worked with a good friend of mine who’s actually a bat biologist and he suggested, I think, that I use Vexar. Vexar is so much easier than when I did my first enclosures in Panama with my 72-year old father. We used hardware cloth and filled steel poles that we had scavenged from the Panama Canal dredging division. I didn’t have any money as a graduate student. The material was very heavy, and we carried them three km up a Panamanian river and put in enclosures there. You cut yourself to ribbons on hardware cloth. Whenever I have hurt myself in streams it has generally been from a piece of rebar or a piece of hardware cloth - which I’ve installed. Vexar was meant to keep chickens from cutting their feet and it was wonderful. And then Bill Rainey suggested that we use these things called hog rings. It’s a ring that you clamp shut, so it pinches through the nostrils of a pig and then you can lead the animal (cruel, actually). We repurposed them, and they were very great for closing and sealing things on the Vexar. And then my father, who grew up on a dirt floor homestead with gravity-fed water in Idaho, taught me something that has never been surpassed in technology for stream enclosures or other enclosures, which is– if nothing else works, cut up an inner tube. There are places where you can’t tie PVC pipe and screens together under water, at some impossible angle, but you can always tightly wrap bicycle inner tube around it. I think all of us who work in the field enjoy improvising technologies that go from the stone age, through 19th century hardware stores, to, these days, electronic technologies (but we older ecologists are terrified by electronics). The other stuff that is so much fun is the arts and crafts aspect of doing field manipulations. It seems you always have to invent new stuff, you always have to go into some local hardware store saying, ‘what can I do with these dog dishes?’ (a question Paul Dayton made famous). There’s a lot of that and a lot of it hasn’t changed. That’s the other thing I really like about the experience of working so long at the Eel, but really about any kind of field ecology where you collaborate with people who love it as well -you’re always trading these fun technologies, and many of them take you back to the nineteenth century, and then you realize life wasn’t as tough then as one might think, because those guys had really ingenious manually operated tools or water power tools that really worked. We just don’t know how to do it now, but they had many ways that were so ingenious, and it made doing things back then easier than you might expect.”

“If you were to do it again now, you could probably parameterize the whole model in one go, rather than doing piecemeal statistical analyses for each function that goes into the model. So, I suspect that if you did it now, given the advances in statistical methods, you would probably use a different statistical approach. My hunch, though, is it would probably give you very similar insight there.”

“In 1964, my advisor said to me, ‘What kind of job are you planning to go to?’ And I turned around and said, ‘Why, I have no idea’. We didn’t even think about it. I just assumed I would be a professor somewhere. Then he said to me, ‘Well, there are two jobs opening up that I know of, one in Cornell and one at the University of Kansas. Would you like to interview?’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess so’. Two of us – one, a big fellow named Dick Root, who is now deceased, and I went and interviewed for the two of them. We met each other on the street at Berkeley afterwards. And Root said to me, ‘Well, which one do you like?’ And I said, ‘Well, I like KU – University of Kansas – because it is a little more academic’, and Root said, ‘Well I like Cornell because it is a little more agricultural’. And so I said, ‘OK, Dick you take the one at Cornell, I will take the one in Kansas.’ That was it. That was competition. There was not even a job advertisement in Science or anywhere. In those circumstances, you didn’t think about – Will this paper get me a job? Will this paper make me famous? Will this paper be job security over the next 20 years? I wrote the paper because I was curious and I liked explaining it to other people.”

“in the late 1990s, there was no “track changes” feature in MS Word, but there was text highlighting. We would each use two highlight colours – one highlight colour was for your new text and one highlight colour was for your comments on the existing text. When you received a copy from the other author, you went through, and for the new text, if you liked what they wrote, you “decolorized” it, as we used to say. I remember manuscript drafts would get huge in size with the four rainbow colours of highlighting, but gradually it would shrink down as we finalized the wording.”

“In those days in the UK, I think this was normal; it was unusual for the supervisor to put his/her name on the papers written by students. For example, H van Balen, a contemporary of mine and a student of [HN] Kluijver’s, was the sole author on his main works. I continued this, only adding my name to a student’s work if a) I had taken a major part in the analysis or b) obtained the grant which funded the work. The putting of supervisor’s name on students papers I think spread from the US. Pressure to publish and shortage of funds has more or less forced supervisors to publish with their students. Another, though different, reason for multi-authored papers is that often teams of people with different skills combine on a project.”