“Miss D.S. Paterson, Miss G. Robinson and Miss S. Carter [] were all secretaries, i.e. typists. For preparation and alterations of manuscripts, in those pre-computer days, the goodwill of departmental secretaries was essential!”

“Most of the software in Table 3 of the paper is obsolete in 2018. It has been replaced by functions in R and Matlab. Only Canoco is still around; this is the mother of all modern ordination packages, the one to which developers of new software compare the results of their code to make sure it works correctly.”

“Most were drawn by hand, and they show it. In 1976, the software options were limited.”

“My dissertation written in 1976 was the first one that was produced with a word processor in the Department of Biology at the University of North Carolina (I still have some of the boxes of 80-character punch cards on which it was typed). During my PhD research, the first hand-held calculators became available, and one summer I was able to borrow one; it cost about $300 (my monthly salary at the time), and did only basic arithmetic. I’d have something more powerful now! Perhaps one advantage of that earlier work is that all the data were hand-written, and I still have the notebooks with those data from my dissertation, which I hope will facilitate someone repeating some of that work in the future.”

“My memory is that it was done mostly over email. Gosh, at this stage, it might have even been by mail. I don’t even know if you could send an attachment back in those days.”

“North Carolina had an art studio for people who were doing science. And I think we brought them a hand version of that graphic and they made it look nicer.”

“Nowadays I suppose I would write this as two papers, because people do that, but I tend to write longer papers.”

“Nowadays, there are more tools available to study behaviour, such as fancy telemetry systems and RFID transponder systems that allow you to “see” behaviour that previously remained hidden or was not tractable on such scale, but other than that, little has changed. And of course from the molecular side, the tools also improved dramatically with the use of microsatellite markers or single-nucleotide polymorphisms, which allow you to assign paternity and measure individual genetic diversity (heterozygosity) with much higher precision.”

“Nowadays, there’s more politics involved. Then I was on my own, so I didn’t need to discuss things. Whenever I had an idea (sometimes a good one), I was able to do it straight away in the morning when I woke up. But now if I have an idea, I have to make sure that everybody’s happy, or that we get permission. We now collaborate intensively with Nature Seychelles. At that time, you didn’t have any ethics approval ; you just do the things you want to do. But now it has to go through approval. This is, of course, important, because they are endangered birds, and before you do any things, you must make sure you don’t harm the bird, and also that all are happy what you do.”

“Nowadays, we actually look at the reflectance and try to match colors to the actual butterflies, but in those days we just took a photo and tried and made it look about right to the human vision. We didn’t have the methods to kind of use bird vision models to match the models.”

“Of course, I did my thesis in the ancient days — before DNA-based information was available for any organisms except a few lab models. As a result, it was very difficult to study endosymbionts, which typically do not grow in lab culture. The only options were microscopy and antibiotics, which are very limited on their own. So I didn’t work on symbionts.”

“Ray was in Seattle, and Al was in Irvine. Skype and email hadn’t yet evolved, and so we communicated largely by mail and occasional visits.”

“Remember, in those days the most important thing to get done was the thesis. Not writing papers for journals. Papers for journals were sort of an extra. The thesis was the hard thing. Once you got that done, some of us then wrote a lot of papers about the content of the thesis, but many other people never did at all, so all they have is a thesis somewhere in a library. This business today of publishing papers as chapters of your thesis, at the time or even before you get your degree, was not done in the 60s. In fact, there were even arguments that if you published a chapter it could not be included in your thesis.”

“Rob had been developing his EstimateS software, and I was in the early phases of developing the original EcoSim with Gary Entsminger. At that time, those programmes were fairly novel. There wasn’t as much software available then as there is today. This was well before the days of R and the open-source revolution, so there certainly weren’t that many pieces of free software available. We were excited about that aspect of it as well – to have these computing tools that we could introduce at the same time when we talked about the theory.”

“Some of the graphics were roughed out on a graphics terminal, but a lot of the artwork was done by hand, by me, either using press type or other ancient technologies, like a pen and India ink. That is probably why one of the species names is spelled incorrectly. Things have gotten much better since then, except for my spelling.”

“Sometimes, I am a little surprised about how well it was written, because in those days it was much harder. It was the dawn of email. Okay, we had the first versions of Microsoft Word, so it was starting to get easier. Today, in most countries of the world, scientists have all the papers at their fingertips, but in those days, I remember, it sometimes took several months for a paper to arrive at your desk, after you have ordered the paper in the library.”

“Statistics have just been completely revolutionized since that time. So, we would have much more sophisticated ways of analyzing those data now, through, linear mixed models and Bayesian types of approaches that would have many fewer restrictive assumptions than what we were using. So, in that sense, I think, we would analyze it in a different way. I mean, I think, fortunately, the results are straightforward enough that you probably would get the same answer no matter how you look at it.”

“Surely, it would never even be reviewed now because of its length. This is probably a good thing because it would be more readable, yet I have always enjoyed my “story telling” approach to ecology, that involves an understanding of the big picture in time and space. Even as a student I realized how important scaling time and space were, and that would be lost if the paper were to be chopped up as demanded by today’s standards.”

“That [preparing a figure] was done pretty much by hand with rub-on letters. That was the pathetic way we did things back then.”

“The big difference might be that, today, one would expect larger sample sizes, because the technology used to analyse samples isotopically has changed so much. Samples had to be prepared and run individually (by me) in the early days. Today, the systems are automated and students would simply submit their samples to a lab and sample throughput would be comparatively fast and less expensive.”