“[Robert] Lansman was a faculty member in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Georgia, which was housed in the same building as my Genetics Department. One day in about 1977, I went to Bob to ask whether I might work in his lab for a brief time to learn restriction enzyme digestion techniques. Restriction enzymes had just recently been discovered, and I thought they might offer a means by which to study regulatory genes (perhaps encoded by repetitive DNA) in the nuclear genome. Bob welcomed me into his lab, but emphasized that he had little or no experience with nuclear DNA, but instead was interested in the biochemistry and physiology of mitochondria. Soon we found ourselves doing restriction digests of mtDNA (for example, in mice and gophers that I had been studying). The results were so fascinating that I quickly jettisoned my idea of studying nuclear regulatory genes, and instead switched almost all of my attention to mtDNA.”

“A friend (Jerome Harding) and I decided to escape from the urban Chicago and made a trip around the tip of Lake Michigan to the Indiana Dunes one weekend morning. We were walking along the lakeshore, we noticed the abundance of insects among the debris above the water line. It suddenly occurred to me that we were looking at a Bumpus [1899]-like sampling situation. I quickly showed Jerome, a computer programmer, how to capture and save two samples of the most abundant insect, the pentatomid bug.”

“All I was trying to say was, look, these are animals that you’re looking at - a female animal. And yeah, sure, she’s got to get enough to eat today. But she’s also got to look after babies. She can’t be too far away from them. She’s got to defend her territory. She’s got to worry about males who might kill the babies. All these different things they have to do at the same time. It is much, much more complicated. And that’s why the title became ‘Food is not enough’. I was struggling to find a good catchy title. I still don’t know that I like that title very much. In fact, that was suggested to me by Marcus Feldman, the editor of The American Naturalist at the time. We were like, Okay, sure, this is what we’re trying to say.”

“Around this time, John Lawton – my post-doc. supervisor at Silwood Park – asked me to read his contribution to a symposium volume on the topic of whether biodiversity is important. And John was actually arguing that most species were redundant, and that if you lost them it probably doesn’t matter that much. And I read this and thought – I can’t believe people ask this question. My own feeling was – how could it not matter? I mean, if you lost biodiversity, surely an ecological system would just not work as well, right? And so there I was, with the Ecotron, and I suddenly thought – we could answer this question with the Ecotron.”

“First of all, I observed there were helpers at the nest. And at that time I did not have the book so I was surprised to see adult birds that were sexually mature that did not reproduce themselves but helped other birds raising their offspring and incubating the egg. And then I also found out that the whole island was covered with territories. There was no empty space left on the island for other birds to establish new territory. So I thought maybe habitat saturation was a driver for cooperation. And then I mentioned this to a lecturer I knew in Holland. And he said, oh, you should read that book by Krebs and Davies. It was one of my old lecturers, and then he sent a copy of the chapter on cooperative breeding of that book to me (it took 3-4 weeks for the post to get it to me). I read that chapter and I realized that cooperation sort of has been observed in other bird species and mammalian species. However, I did observe other things which were not written in the book chapter. But at least, the book chapter formed the basis for my thinking.”

“I actually did not go there wanting to do this experiment. I had no idea that this is what I would do for my postdoc. I had done a bunch of chemical ecology as a graduate student. One of these invasive species that Bob [Whitlatch] and Rick [Osman] were studying didn’t seem to get eaten very much by any of the native predators, and they were wondering whether there were any chemical defenses that this invasive were producing. And so, that’s one of the things that I went there thinking I would do. But when I got there and saw this other thing that they had going on, that I could be involved in, I thought that’s just way more interesting.”

“I came to the University of Michigan determined to “figure out” coloration in birds and by extension ornamentation in animals generally. I decided to focus on carotenoid coloration, which was almost unstudied in birds at the time, because of an obscure statement in an Ornithology text by Joel Welty: “Canaries will, in successive molts, gradually change from yellow to intense orange if fed red peppers.” Condition dependent sexual signaling was a new and exciting topic in behavioral ecology when I read that statement about canary coloration in the early 1980s. The prospect of diet-dependent coloration sounded intriguing to me. Then, when I went to the literature to find out more about carotenoid coloration in birds, I found a paper published in 1976 in The Auk on pigmentation in House Finches. In that paper, Alan Brush and Dennis Power used thin layer chromatography to identify the carotenoid pigments in house finches, one of the first characterizations of carotenoid pigments in feathers in any bird. House finches were an invasive species in Michigan, having just colonized the area a few years before I arrived in Ann Arbor, and they seemed to be a perfect study bird. So, in 1987, I started capturing wild house finches and visually quantifying their feather coloration.”

“I don’t even remember why he was in the vehicle with me, but we stopped by the site where the exclosures were and I said, “Hey, I want to show you this experiment. It’s pretty cool.” And that’s when he said, “Wow, the amount of nitrogen in this plot is probably incredible; you should measure that.””

“I first submitted the paper to American Naturalist, with both the data and the food web model I was talking about above. The reviewers liked it ok, but felt that the model and data didn’t match very well, and so it was rejected. So, we chopped out the model and decided to go for Nature, where it was accepted (after revisions of course). We eventually published the model that went along with it in the Ecological Niches book.”

“I found the snakes while I was turning over logs and rocks to catch lizards (usually in the early morning, when the ground was cold and the reptiles were slow). They were a convenient size for lab trials on predation, and not venomous enough to be a risk.”

“I gave a talk at the Zoology department in Oxford and presented the data on the sequence of males and females visited. Alan attended the talk, came up to me afterwards and kindly offered to analyse the data as it is now presented in the paper.”

“I had been intrigued for a while by the idea that plants could communicate. Around 1981, David Rhoades told me that his work suggested this possibility. He observed that trees that were near neighbors that had been chewed by caterpillars became poor hosts for subsequent caterpillars. He was unable to repeat these results, and they were not properly replicated or controlled. Ian Baldwin and Jack Schultz conducted lab experiments and found a similar phenomenon. However, the whole line of inquiry was shut down when an influential paper by John Lawton convinced most ecologists that the notion that plants communicated was rubbish. Then, in 1990, a paper by Ted Farmer and Bud Ryan was sent to me to review. They presented rigorous evidence for communication between cut sagebrush and potted tomato plants, albeit in sealed jars in the lab. I found this paper quite convincing although it wasn’t clear to me that similar things occurred in nature, involving plants that co-occurred (unlike sagebrush and agricultural tomato).”

“I had gone to present our thinking about individual specialization, to Brad Shaffer’s lab meeting. I wasn’t in Brad Shaffer’s lab, but I thought it was a good opportunity to tell them what we were doing [...]. There was a tradition of hanging out and having a beer after lab meetings. And in that after-presentation time over some beers, we got into a fairly active discussion about how exactly you quantify these things. We pulled up [a] literature search there and then, and found a few possibilities. And we came up with some of our own, had a very late night brainstorming session and put together the bulk of that paper – at least the outline of it – there and then, that particular evening. I’d say it was one of the most productive single evenings I’ve ever had.”

“I had this idea about fruit dispersal and group foraging in a little bat that both feeds on nectar and fruit. But these bats were very hard to study because they were very easily disturbed and would fly out of the roost whenever I tried to catch them. Vampire bats, on the other hand, were really common and very easy to work on. Around the same period of time – those three months – Jack Bradbury went to a regular bat meeting where he heard a German biologist – Uwe Schmidt – report that he saw vampire bats regurgitate blood to each other in his captive colony. Jack wrote me a letter and told me about that observation and said that, maybe, this might be something I wanted to think about. And so I actually began, at that time, trying to catch and band vampire bats, and then dreamed up the project that I subsequently did between ’78 and ’83.”

“I happened to be talking with Dan Boone, who was the manager of the Aleutian Islands Unit of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. He approached me and said the military – both the Navy and the US Air Force – were interested in having work done on sea otters at their respective military bases. Adak was a naval base and Shemya Island, where we worked some years later, was an Air Force base. There was a military programme, called the Legacy Programme, which was for doing wildlife and ecological research on US military bases. Some of that Legacy money had gone to those particular sites and the Aleutians Refuge was asked to advise the military on what to do. That’s how I got involved with it.”

“I lost almost 50% of my plots to accidents of one kind or another – the owner of the field site changed their mind, there was a storm, there was too much rain, the city decided to put a water pipeline through the middle of my plot! I mean all kinds of things; I lost a lot. If I was advising a student today about doing this kind of fieldwork research I would advise them to set up a lot of plots and anticipate that a big number of them – 50% of them – are going to be destroyed over the next two years.”

“I read an article in The Boston Globe about a study that had been done in the educational literature that asked the question: “Were boys really smarter than girls in mathematics?” which seemed inherently very interesting to me. And the answer was, “No, they’re not.” It was based on a study of children in elementary school grades. And what they had done was combined the results of many different studies using a meta-analysis. Well, I had never heard of meta-analysis before, and I was instantly electrified by the concept. And they explained in this newspaper article that this was a relatively new statistical technique to combine the results of separate studies to reach general conclusions and to resolve apparent discrepancies and results among studies. And I thought, “Wow, this is something!” I immediately was knocked off my seat. I thought this is something that we could use to resolve these questions about the effects of competition in ecology, because there had been many studies with many different results. And I thought this would be an amazing tool to introduce to ecology.”

“I searched the literature for some species to work on for my PhD thesis. I wanted to look at how variation in calls influenced mate preference within the species, and I decided to work on red-eyed tree frogs in Panama. But they were very high up in the canopy and I was having a difficult time recording the males and a difficult time watching the matings. And when I was trying to record these males, all these Tungara frogs would be calling at my feet. They were very common and I would always be kicking the frogs to shut them out so I could hear the red-eyed tree frogs calling. That’s when I thought that since these Tungara frogs are always calling, maybe I should study them instead. That’s how I started to study them.”

“I started to work on fruits and frugivores in the Sierra de Cazorla area in the fall of 1978. In 1981, I had, for the first time, the opportunity to witness a massive spring flowering, and then an autumn fruiting event, by Phillyrea latifolia. I was absolutely amazed by the spectacular phenomenon, as all trees were in flower, and later in fruit, over countless hectares. By then I was well aware of the concept of ‘mast fruiting’ as applied to dry-fruited plants like oak or beech, but had not heard about any similar instance for fleshy-fruited plants. In principle, satiation of mutualists did not seem to me a reasonable strategy for a fruiting plant, which spurred my curiosity. In the years following 1981, I kept waiting patiently for another massive flowering event to take place, so that a study on the seed dispersal consequences of massive fruiting could be planned and undertaken. That finally happened in 1989, and we went ahead with our study that year.”

“I think it was the year 2000 when there was the ISBE (International Society for Behavioral Ecology) conference in Zurich [...] and that’s where I first met Rob Brooks, who then was giving a talk about his very fancy result on guppies, where basically he was saying that his results favor the ‘Fisherian’ rather than the ‘good genes’ process, when it comes to explaining why females are preferring this trait. I had never met him before, but I remember sitting in the audience and thinking, hey, but hang on [...] maybe the better males are actually intrinsically better, but they can get so much benefit out of putting that all allocation-wise into attractiveness, rather than into survival traits, assuming that there’s a trade off. He hasn’t actually shown that it’s this process as opposed to that other process. And of course, when you’re a young scientist – I was much younger then – you’re kind of nervous about criticizing somebody, so I didn’t dare to do that during the conference. I thought that I need to write up my thoughts. [...] That critique I wrote became an Ecology Letters paper.”