“The big thing is that it’s a lot longer than most papers that I write today. But that’s less me than how the field has changed. There’s very little place for this kind of paper anymore. When I was a graduate student, Ecology was the premier journal in the field, as, I think, for the most part, it still is, although there are a lot more journals now, and some of the others have come in to prominence. But at that time, Ecology papers were very detailed, had a fair amount of natural history, and they were really meaty papers. In some ways, I feel that it was a kinder and gentler time, so to speak, in that you had more time to read in those days. I’d be interested to hear your take on this, actually, but I feel that it’s much more of a mash up society today – and this is true of me as it is, I think, of students – we have everything at our fingertips, everything is hyperlinked, it’s very rare to sit down and remove all distractions and actually read through a paper carefully and have a chance to think about it. I think it’s fair to say that’s the way we used to do it. When I was a student, you would sit in the library or sit at home with your journal or wherever, and read the thing, whereas now much of it as done online, you’re checking the abstract to see if it has something you need, you’re flashing through the figures. So, it was a different time. And I think the writing style, to some extent, reflects that. I’m not sure people read Ecological Monographs papers anymore. I don’t know. I think there’s been a big change in, you know, not just scientists or students, but in the population of the world, in general, in our attention span.”

“The early 1990s pre-dated a lot of the more visible current mechanisms for a paper garnering attention (no social media, no Faculty of 1000, etc.) This is one of a handful of articles of the ones I’ve published where one or more mathematical ecologists whom I had not met expressed their admiration of the paper to me within the first few years after it was published.”

“The idea of doing experiments in the field with wild things was not a prominent way of doing biology in those days. In those days, you made observations, you wrote about your observations, you speculated about your observations and you went on. Today, we automatically think of doing experiments to tease apart what observations we have made, but back in the ‘60s that was not very common, especially in esoteric biological areas; obviously, in agriculture, experiments were the standard way of going at the world.”

“The idea was to put a layer of black carbon onto the paper, so that when the mouse ran through the tube it would pick up carbon on its feet and leave white footprints on the black paper. At the time I used a very unhealthy method in that I held the strips of paper over a benzene flame to make them black. We don’t use that method anymore. More recently, my students mix carbon black with oil and paint it onto a piece of waxed paper. They staple this paper onto a larger white paper strip so that the animals walk across the waxed paper and leave black footprints on the white paper”

“The main thing would be that now the methodology for doing computer analyses in general and comparative work in particular is so much more sophisticated than it was.”

“The model cuckoos were actually stuffed real cuckoos – taxidermic mounts, which we got from the museum. We only had two. Of course, reviewers these days could rightly point out that there’s lots of pseudo replication, that we’re using the same model again and again. I think we could defend that by saying even getting one stuffed cuckoo was pretty amazing, because these are protected birds, and we were relying on specimens that the museum allowed us to have.”

“The one difference is that instead of going online to read papers by people, I had to go to the actual physical library and look through actual physical journals to read their papers. But otherwise, it’s not that different. And then, you wrote to people, and again, instead of emailing them, you had to write to them. But then you wrote to them, and they answered.”

“The phylogenetic approaches have changed a lot. Traditional approaches were based on Sanger sequencing. This approach provides long, high-quality sequences but suffers from a number of limitations including the ability to sequence only a single locus per reaction. In contrast to Sanger sequencing, Next-Generation Sequencing technologies provide vastly larger quantities of data much faster and for far less money. As a result, next-gen sequencing approaches have rapidly taken over. So, yes, the availability of data is really shifting things tremendously. But to tell that particular story, we didn’t need any more data than we showed in the 2004 Science paper.”

“The programs used to calculate food web statistics was created to run on Apple computers that are obsolete today, and the code was never revised for more modern machines. So it is not used anymore.”

“The tradition in Ecology at the time was that PhD students developed their own projects. They also applied for their own small sources of funding, which meant that their projects had to be cheap. Dissertations could be on very different organisms, and on very different questions, from those of their advisors. (For example, my advisor, John Hendrickson, worked on sea turtles.) Hence, most PhD students published solo-authored papers. This does not mean to say that our advisors were not essential. My advisor cared very deeply about his students and the quality of their work. I have tried to maintain this tradition in my lab group. Some of my students have run independent projects as part of their dissertations. I am not a coauthor on these studies.”

“Then we fitted some log-normal distributions and log-series distributions just using a conventional method of regular goodness-of-fit statistics. But now there are more powerful model selection statistics, which can be used, and would strengthen insights into how well different distributions fit. That said, I don’t think it would change our conclusions about the patterns that we saw.”

“There is no way that that one would repeat today my 1985 paper precisely as I did not back then. You might monitor actual nests, preferably using cameras. And in places where you couldn’t find the bird nests, you would have to use vastly more realistic-looking nests and eggs. You would have to hide them better than I did. And you would, again, probably watch them with cameras. And you should do the whole project on a much larger scale than I did.”

“There is only one figure, and it is really pretty terrible. I used to generate all of my graphics using a statistics program called Statview on an early generation Macintosh computer. I would create graphical summaries of data in PICT format that I could then import into a draw program. I really miss those old stats and drawing programs.”

“There was a time when most PhD papers were single-authored by the people doing the work. Currently, most PhD-related papers are not single-authored for two reasons. In general our work is much more collaborative, so there’s often the adviser, but also other people as co-authors. The science has changed; it’s much more interdisciplinary. Also, PhD theses currently maybe a little bit less independent from advisors that in the past.”

“There was certainly no popular press interest in it. There was very little of that sort of stuff in those days. But I got a tremendous number of reprint requests, which, in those days, was the way you found out if people were interested in your work. You would get a postcard requesting a copy of the paper. Typically, in those days, you would get a few hundred reprints from the journal. I probably mailed out well over 500, because I remember I had to ask for them to be recopied. I ran out of the original reprints.”

“There were no phones and the personal computer hadn’t been invented, so it was quite isolating.”

“These days, we tend to have a lot more material in the supplementary material section. I don’t think we had any supplementary material; this is a very short paper. But these days, you’re expected to provide much more background support for your analyses and so on. That’s one big difference.”

“They are on VHS tape which isn’t used anymore. We use different kind of recorders – DAT recorders – now. So we don’t have the right kind of playback machine [to play VHS tapes].”

“They (the phylogenies) originally were hand drawn, but I think I had, I believe, a graphic artist in our medical school redraw them.”

“They were hand drawn, just on a sheet of paper.”