“When I complained to John Lawton that the libraries weren’t open during the weekend – we didn’t have the internet back then – he said nobody stays here late at night, or comes in on weekends, except the crazy Americans! I was one of those crazy Americans.”

“When I was an undergraduate student, I got the chance to go on an ornithological expedition to the Andes in Ecuador, the purpose of which was, basically, to do a survey of all the cloud forests. At that time, I became interested in questions that we now call Macroecology. I read a lot of the literature of people like John Terborgh and Jim Brown, and since we were working in mountains, I particularly read everything I could about mountains and diversity patterns. The literature was unanimous that it was a universal rule that species richness declined with altitude. So, with this background, we went on these expeditions. We basically spent 6 months in pouring rain in the cloud forest. It was fabulous; the diversity around us was just astonishing. When we were done with that – this was way back in the time of no emails – we posted a snail mail back to our supervisor in Copenhagen. We were four people in this expedition, and in our mail we said that since we had now worked six months, would it be okay if we stayed on and made a venture down in the Amazon. At that time, the Amazon was thought of as the richest place on earth and we really wanted to see it. We waited and a month later we got a reply saying – Yes, we could go down to the Amazon. We went down and I have never been so disappointed in my life! I expected to see so many more bird species than I saw in the cloud forest, but there were fewer. I was shocked because everything I read and all the textbooks told me that I should find more species in the lowland. So I started to think about what was wrong – Was it very unusual? Was it because we couldn’t find the species? – this was kind of simmering in my head while I was doing my Master’s degree on other things.”

“When I was in Tanzania for many months, we would set up telephone appointments every few weeks. There was no working internet in that part of Tanzania in those days and no mobile phone nets! To talk to Jacques or Frans on the phone I had to make an appointment ahead of time, and had to come to town to the house of someone who had a working telephone landline.”

“Where to begin? When I began graduate school, personal computers did not yet exist, or if they did, they were mostly used by hobbyists. Real computing power, which is now dwarfed by the laptop computer on which I am writing this, resided in massive room-filling machines that were time-shared by universities like Duke, UNC [University of North Carolina] Chapel Hill, and NC [North Carolina] State. The costs of running and maintaining those facilities were shared, and subvented to some extent, by charging users for the computer time used. I think this was mostly ‘funny money’, but major users were expected to pay for their computer use with grant funds. I was a minor user. One communicated with the computers using decks of IBM punch cards, read through a card reader, and results were returned some time later by a device called a line printer. It is now all delightfully archaic. About the time I finished my degree, it became possible to communicate directly with the time-shared machines using new things called video terminals. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven…The changes in computing power that I’ve seen since 1976 when I started graduate school, and the ease of use of computing technology for statistical analysis, graphics, modeling, and things we never dreamed we’d be using computers for are unfathomable for today’s typical undergraduate student.”

“Whole-ecosystem experiments were unfamiliar back in those days. Ecologists wanted experiments to be done in tiny containers with lots of replicates, but it is impossible to study trophic cascades realistically in tiny jars. When I look at the paper today, I think the amount of statistical detail we included is rather ridiculous. But we had to include it to placate the referees.”

“Yes, (I wrote the paper) right there in my room, longhand, and for a fee it was typed by some kind secretary. No computers!”

“Yes, at least in the old days, it was important, if you were trying to publish in Nature or Science, to be as lucid as possible. Things have changed now. If you read the average Nature or Science paper nowadays, it’s so highly specialised, so technical; it’s very hard to follow. And there is a lot more material too; you are expected to put a lot more into it. A small idea, a small result, is no longer something that Nature or Science will even think about, unless it’s something really profound. And most often, nowadays, you need to have a strong molecular biology component, otherwise journals don’t even look at it. I think, if I submitted something like this now, it probably won’t get accepted.”

“Yes, I think we did share drafts over snail mail.”

“Yes, it [literature search] was challenging, but on the other hand, there were many fewer papers in the literature back then than there are now. During my BSc, I learned how to use BioAbstracts (on paper) to do a search, so I used the same approach for my literature searches during my MSc. I was lucky to be in Ottawa, because I could go to the National Research Council library which had virtually every journal I could hope to find. They also had nice quiet research rooms. I could select a room, take in a pile of journal volumes, and if I didn’t finish with them that day, I could leave them there until the next day when I could go back and continue my search. This made the literature search very efficient.”

“Yes, today I would use sequences of several hundred genomes, representing more clades of endosymbionts, instead of a handful of single genes from just a couple of groups. One can get >1000x data for less effort today.”