“I visited there [National Museum in Ottawa] in 1988 to measure white-winged crossbills, which I was focusing on for fieldwork at the time. But after telling the curator at the museum –Earl Godfrey– about my ideas on the Newfoundland crossbill, which I had been thinking about that summer, he recommended that I look at the Red crossbills he collected in the Cypress Hills in the 1940s. They were large-billed and seemingly resident like in Newfoundland. So, I measured them without any idea that they might become important to me.”

“I wanted to work on feeding behavior in birds actually, and I was really interested in the work of one of my professors, Philip Ashmole, who is a bird behavioral ecologist. I signed up to work with Philip Ashmole, but then he offered a project of spiders and that’s how I started working on spiders.”

“I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and taking a seminar course with W. D. Hamilton, who was on the faculty there. And he was, and had been for some time, interested in the effect of parasites and pathogens on a whole range of things in host ecology, evolution and behaviour, and had already published, and was working, on the role of parasites in the evolution of sexual reproduction itself. Then, he was getting increasingly interested in whether parasites were also important drivers in sexual selection and mate choice and the evolution of secondary sexual characteristics, like the peacock’s tail. And for that he wanted to not just do modelling or theoretical work; he wanted to see if his idea would hold up in actual data. I was in the seminar and we were talking about it and he wanted to do a study looking at whether birds that had more ornaments were also more likely to be subject to parasites and pathogens. And I’ve been a birder for a long time and thought that sounded like an interesting idea. So we started working together on it. And then once we had the results, and they looked interesting and supportive of the hypothesis, we decided to make it into a paper. [...] I came in thinking I wanted to work with Dick Alexander who also was, you know, a well-known figure in social evolution and animal behaviour, and didn’t really know much about Hamilton at the time that I started graduate school. I just discovered that I was really interested in the work that he was doing and so I ended up working with him.”

“I was a postdoc with Russell Lande, the theoretician who put quantitative genetics into evolution. But in classic Lande style, he went off on a sabbatical, for a while, just when I arrived. So I ended up working with Mark Kirkpatrick, who was one of his disciples, and learnt a lot of the theory. Actually, I learnt a lot of the theory from both Russ and Mark. At that stage, Mark had been already collaborating with Steve on how sexual selection in monogamous birds might work. That’s the history of 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 don’t know what the rate of rejection without review was in 1990 (it is about 60% now), but my manuscript received a full review. In the decision letter, the editor, Rory Howlett, used the word “reject”, and I thought my paper was rejected. About a week after I got my decision letter from Nature and when I was getting ready to start to rework it for a new journal, I mentioned to my grad student friend and colleague, Michael Nachman (now director of MVZ [Museum of Vertebrate Zoology] at Berkeley), that I had had a paper rejected by Nature. He had never seen a decision letter from Nature and asked if he could see it. I’ll never forget his face as he read the letter. He looked up from the letter and said “Geoff, this is not a rejection letter. This is a tentative acceptance letter. They want you to revise the paper and resubmit!”. I was completely clueless. I had seen the word “reject” and assumed Nature didn’t want it. Thank goodness Michael was there to coach me. So I revised the paper, wrote a response to the reviewer’s critiques, and the next letter I got was “you will receive proofs in a month”.”

“I was already down there watching the vampire bats long before that paper came out. But once it came out it actually gave me the idea for using the censusing as a way to measure the opportunity for the bats to share food with each other. That came directly from Axelrod & Hamilton. They have this little variable called ‘w’ which is sort of the likelihood that a particular pair will find the same circumstance in the future. Sort of the opportunity for future reciprocation. Earlier, I had some other method I had come up with to contrast kin selection and reciprocity, but when I read their paper it was like – Aha! I could just use my census data to calculate association. It was fortuitous because I did not have a specific plan for the census data at the beginning, except that it seemed like a good way to quantify social organization.”

“I wasn’t certain whether I was going to go into Evolution or into Community Ecology. After I started working on this project, I was still trying to make up my mind. I had an opportunity to do research on fishes in the Amazon. I was in Brazil for my second field season and it was a total catastrophe because the government prevented our research team from going out into the field. So I spent about three or four weeks in Manaus writing out the equations that finally became that paper.”

“I worked alone except for one day during the trapping period when my sisters were in town and they wanted to come with me. That was a bad idea. I was doing the removal experiment for recruitment estimation, which meant I had to move the captured mice to another woodlot several km away. My sisters seemed incapable of opening a trap without letting the mouse go, so this created a bit of a blip in my data.”

“In his signed review, he [Jared Diamond] said the paper was better than he expected it to be from its pedestrian-sounding title, which was originally “Metapopulation dynamics of the bay checkerspot butterfly.” We adopted the alternative title he suggested.”

“In the next step we had to prevent them [stickleback fish] from seeing existing differences in red intensity. If it had not been fish, using the same artificial red color on both males would be a good choice. However, older studies from the 40s had tried nail varnish and their sticklebacks went astray. I got the idea to use filtered light instead when I saw the ballet “The Firebird” in the Berne opera house. The dancers changed color again and again. When the main lights were on, one could see that they all had white clothes which appeared red or blue when the color of the light was changed. I tried green lamps and suddenly all red disappeared from the sticklebacks and the different reds looked brownish.”

“It was an experiment that I set up for an entirely other purpose, at the beginning of my postdoc, and then after it had run for a few years, we started seeing results that, I guess, we could have anticipated had we thought about it more, but they were pretty dramatic.”

“One day as I was walking across an old field, a beetle flew over my head and landed on a small shrub in front of me. And an ant ran after the beetle, trying to grab it, and the beetle then flew away. That sort of stuck in my head, and later on the same day I walked back by the same plant and looked closely at it. There were ants all over the surface of the plant. I thought that that was kind of curious and I noticed that the ants were going in and out of big thorns on the branches. I took one of these trees home to dissect and see what was inside the thorns and so on. So, I was looking at the ants like ants, without thinking about anything more. Well, maybe a week later I cut down two trees in a pasture, to take one of them home to dissect again. The other one, by accident, I just left there, by the stump. So there were two stumps about a metre apart, one with a tree cut down next to it and the other with no tree. About six weeks later, I walked by that pair of stumps and noticed that the stump that had no tree lying next to it had produced some sprouts but they were in terrible condition. They had been eaten down to almost nothing. Whereas the stump that had the cut down tree crown next to it had a beautiful one metre tall sprout growing out from it with beautiful leaves and very good condition and ants all over this sprout. Well, that caused me to realise suddenly that what I was looking at was an interaction where the ants were protecting the tree. It wasn’t just an accident that there were ants there. They were very involved with the tree. So I picked that up to study for my dissertation. And my dissertation basically consisted of removing the ants from thousands of these trees.”

“One of those names, Stuart Pimm, was one of the formal reviewers. He had a very important input as he made us realize that the expected hypothesis against which to compare our results was not a random network, but a compartmentalized one arising from tight, parallel specialization. This is reflected by a key phrase added to the abstract in the last minute.”

“Particularly relevant was Thomas Lewinsohn, who was spending some time in our lab in Sevilla. He had been thinking in very similar terms and had a great understanding of these systems. His major contribution was to make us realize that the basic null model we were using to detect network patterns had a strong type I error [...]. This forced us to think carefully about the importance of null models and to develop a better one.”

“Q: In the paper, you say that this particular 2.72 square kilometer area where you worked burned for seven days after a lightning strike on 17 June 1999. Did you decide to work in this particular 2.72 kilometer area after you discovered that it had burned? A: Yes. In 2000, we found that burnt site with tobacco plants in it, and, retrospectively, wrote in the paper about the history of that burn. It was important to make sure this site was in the first year after the burn. Tobacco plants can grow up to two years after an area has burned, but in the second year, other plants come in. In the first year, there are very few plant species other than wild tobacco. That’s why this information was important, that it was the first year after the burn.”

“Sam Elworthy at Princeton University Press was responsible for the final title. He’s the one who stuck “Unified” in it, and I said “Why are you putting that in, it will just make everybody mad.” And he said, “Well, what you’ve done is unify the theories of biogeography and relative species abundance. That’s an important theoretical unification and if you don’t mention it in the title, well, you’re kind of… putting your light under a blanket. You should say what it is. It’s much more accurate than your original title.” So the editor at the press had a big hand in choosing the title.”

“Shortly after I moved to the University of Chicago [...] in 1974, Jonathan (now Joan) Roughgarden came through to give a seminar and I showed him around my lab. I was in the early planning stage of comparing feeding scores in newborn garter snakes and estimating heritabilities in two populations. Jonathan remarked that the heritability idea was the most interesting to him and that advice helped steer me in that direction.”

“Stephen Pratt is now a professor at Arizona State. I’d known Stephen for a long time; we were both together in Nigel Franks’s lab. He was a postdoc when I was a graduate student. And we both happened to be sharing an office in Princeton when I got the reviews for this paper. Steve provided lots of support and lots of ideas.”

“The [...] paper also revised the global estimates of insect diversity [...]. In the first version of the paper (submitted to Nature), we only said that our host specificity results will lead to new, greatly revised, estimates of global diversity, but did not actually perform the calculation. Both reviewers and the editor suggested that we expand this section and revise the global diversity estimates ourselves, which we finally did. So that part of the paper was not foreseen when we were doing the field research.”

“The next step was to test whether a slight infection with a common fish parasite, Ichtyophthirius multifilis, the “white spot” disease, reduced the health condition and the red intensity of the fish. We thought that was easy to do, because among wild caught fish you usually find an infected one and can breed the parasites taken from that individual. Bad luck, this time we could not find any infected fish. So Theo and I went to town and looked in all aquaria shops for an infected fish. Only in the last shop we saw an infected fish. However, when the owner tried to take the fish out of the tank for us, he said “I cannot sell you this fish because it has parasites”. It took us quite some time to convince him that we needed the fish because of its parasites.”