“The same year I was hired in the Zoology department in Texas, just by chance, they hired a post-doc from Capranica’s lab – Walt Wilczynski – in the Psychology department. We knew each other from before, though we weren’t close friends. But we both felt that looking at this question – variation in the neural basis of sexually-selected calls – would be very much worth doing.”

“Their visit was nicely timed, fortunately, as heavy rain fell while they were there. Therefore we know the exact date when the drought ended.”

“There is a now-famous true story about how the size of the large plots was set at 50 hectares. I asked Robin how big the plot needed to be. I told him that I had mapped 13 hectares in Guanacaste and that we found 120 species in those 13 hectares. We knew from [Tomas] Croat’s flora that BCI [Barro Colorado Island] had roughly 450 species over one centimetre in stem diameter. So I said, “Robin, you know, we’re going to have to do a much bigger plot than 13 hectares, because we just don’t know if we’re going to get enough individuals to study, of each species, if we don’t do a large plot." And so I said, "I think it’s essential that at a minimum we do a plot at least twice as big as the Guanacaste plot, maybe 25 hectares." And Robin without any delay, shot back, “No, we’re going to do 50.” And that’s the entire scientific rationale for 50 ha plots in the global CTFS [Centre for Tropical Forest Science] network! We had no idea what the abundance of species would be in 50 hectares when we started, and as it turned out, there were lots of really rare tree species in the plot, too rare for us to analyze their species-level demography.”

“There was something I wanted to do, but didn’t do, that would have been a clincher. That was whole island experiments, in which we removed leaf-cutter ants from some, rodents from some, and both ants and rodents from others. And, of course, there would have been untreated controls. We were starting to implement these experiments at the end of the study, but then two things happened, both beyond our control. First, there was a 3-year drought that brought the water level in Lago Guri down 26 meters. Yes, that’s 26 meters. This exposed many sq.km. of lake bed and effectively connected all the experimental islands to each other and the mainland. The last year we were there – 2003 – we found 6 different predator species on islands where we had not previously seen any predators at all, over a 13-year time span. This was convincing evidence that, in fact, the islands were predator-free during the main period of our research. Second, Hugo Chavez came in as President of Venezuela in 1999 and was cracking down on foreigners, especially Americans. There was no way we could have continued the project under his government.”

“They’d given us some instructions about length of the manuscript, which I had sort of ignored: my manuscript was about 90 pages long! So when they got it, they said, “Gee, this is really good stuff, but we just don’t have room for it. This would be, you know, a third of the book.” They opined I should not have trouble finding some other place to publish it. So I went off to Ecological Monographs and got very good service from Nelson Hairston Sr. who was the editor of Ecological Monographs at that time. And he basically accepted it within two months with no changes. It’s just one of these accidents of fate. If they had published it in the book, I’m sure it would have gotten much less attention than it did by coming out in Ecological Monographs. So that was a case where being rejected had a very positive outcome.”

“This came about completely by chance. I had just finished my PhD, a study of the behaviour of a little bird, the pied wagtail. My pied wagtails defended territories along a river, and I noticed that every so often, a territory owner would leave his territory to feed elsewhere, particularly on days when there wasn’t much food on the territory. But periodically throughout the day, he would keep coming back to check if there was anyone intruding on his territory, and if there was, he would chase them off. I was very interested to know why he was doing this. I wondered if he was trying to prevent any newcomer spending sufficient time on the territory that it would get to learn its characteristics and, in effect, think this is a jolly nice place to live. If the owner came back periodically and chased off a newcomer before it had time to learn about the territory, it would be easier to get rid of him. To test this idea, I wanted to catch the owner and keep him away for a sufficient length of time for a newcomer to learn the characteristics of the territory, then put the original owner back and ask if he would then find it harder to win back the territory. I tried for a winter and failed completely simply because the birds were too hard to catch. I was then living in a little chalet in Wytham Woods, on the edge of Oxford, where David Lack started his famous studies of the great tit. I had a spare summer because I had just finished my thesis and my next job didn’t start till the autumn. This was 1976, so 40 years ago, and it was romantic living up in the woods. Every day was sunny which was highly unusual for England. People still remember that glorious summer. I think we had a three month spell with cloudless skies and the wood was full of butterflies. And I just noticed some butterflies doing little spiral flights in sunny patches, and I thought, well, that looks like territory defence. Maybe I can do the experiments on them instead of the wagtails because butterflies would be much easier to catch. [...] The whole thing came through natural history curiosity and serendipity, I guess.”

“This paper was indeed my PhD thesis. It was my first attempt to do experiments. I had become interested in using lower organisms to attack problems of development and by sheer luck ran across Kenneth Raper’s PhD thesis and decided cellular slime molds were ideal, and they ended up a lifetime pursuit.”

“Well, actually, it was serendipitous. I went out to the islands to study the behavioural ecology and genetic structure of the island fox. And while I was there, I started to see some mortalities of foxes. I had worked with bald eagles in the past, and had figured that golden eagles, which were irregular visitors to the island, were taking foxes every now and then. And then I started seeing a steep decline in the foxes while I was there, so I just happened to be at the right place, at the right time, to be able to identify what was going on.”

“Well, I had published a paper in 2001 in Animal Conservation based on this. I had used Franck Courchamp’s model in that paper. And then – I think it was either 2000 or 2001, I have got to look back – I gave a presentation on that work at the Society for Conservation Biology meeting in Missoula. Josh came up after the talk and, you know, started rapping with me and we kind of hit it off and became friends. And then a little bit later I was talking to him over the phone about an aspect of the research that I wanted to try and get a handle on, which was to evaluate the food habits of the golden eagles. Josh said: “well, we could use stable isotopes to get at a broad-scale look at their food habits”. So then, he and I started conversing about that and felt Franck was a better modeller than either one of us, so we asked him to be involved. That’s how the team came together.”

“Well, that came about by a series of interactions that I call serendipity. Things happen, and then when you see something happening you jump on it and try to make something of it. I had taken a job as a young professor at Dartmouth College. There, I met Herb Bormann, who was a professor at Dartmouth College. Herb was interested in possibly using Hubbard Brook as a study site. He was familiar with the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory in North Carolina and experiments done there. I was very interested in that as well. And so we talked with Robert Pierce, who was the project manager at Hubbard Brook. And then, I recognized and became friends with Noye Johnson at a Dartmouth football game. Noye was a geologist, who had also come from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a recent faculty member at Dartmouth. I introduced Noye to Herb and the four of us decided to pursue these large-scale studies.”

“Well, when I started to work with frogs for a Master’s thesis, before I went to Cornell to do my PhD, the dogma was – most of which was true – that frog calls evolved to indicate the species [...]. And that females were under strong selection to mate with males of the same species. That’s certainly true. And then when I went to Cornell and started working with bullfrogs – I was not working with calls then; I was studying territoriality – I was struck by how variable their calls were. I mean a bullfrog call sounds like a bullfrog call, but I could clearly tell males apart. I would hear a male and know that he was on a neighbouring territory the night before. That he’d moved over. That’s how I became interested with the frog call, as it had to do with mate selection within a species.”

“When I arrived at my postdoc at the University of Connecticut, my postdoc advisor had been working on invasions, on these marine invertebrate communities that grow on piers and docks and whatnot. And they had a wonderful wealth of natural history information about all of these species, and they knew how to culture them and grow them in the field. They had just developed this movable tile apparatus, which was the technique that we ended up using to manipulate diversity in these experiments. It just all sort of clicked. They had this idea that they wanted to do something like this, and I showed up and had thought about all this diversity-function stuff that I’d read in the literature, and it just sort of all came together in this really nice, very lucky way. Everything just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

“When I planned the experiments, rapidly hardening cyanoacrylate superglue was coming on the market. The brand I used was called “Hot Stuff”, from Satellite City Instant Glues. Testing with feathers from other birds, I found that the glue hardened quickly enough, in just a few seconds, to be suitable for use in the field for tail elongation.”

“When I started getting interested in induced response to herbivory in wild radish, I came up with the idea about transgenerational effects, and it seemed like a bit of a fringe or crazy idea, so it was on the back-burner. What got us to do the experiments is pretty interesting. There’s two pieces of the story I suppose. One is that I had read an obscure paper in The New Zealand Journal of Agriculture that reported that oilseed rape plants, when damaged by aphids, produced more defensive glucosinolates in the seeds. And that was a problem (for human consumption) because glucosinolates in the oil being pressed from the seeds gave it a bad flavour. This gave me the idea that there might be some transfer of information from what the parent plant experiences to what goes into the seed, which henceforth might shape the seedlings’ defences. The other thing is that there was an undergraduate student who came along named Joel Kniskern who was interested in this just as an initial research project. When you have interested undergraduates around, it’s an opportunity to try out some of the more risky ideas, and I proposed to him several different projects. This was the one that he chose.”

“When I went to Stanford and gave my thesis defence, at the back of the room was an old man with his head down on the desk who seemed to be sleeping through the whole thing. We get to the end and he raises his hand and he says ‘Your ants are like the chemicals in my plants’ and at that point the light bulb went off in my head, which should have gone off much earlier, that the ants are the same as secondary compounds in plants, the things that give plants flavours and drugs and all those things. The plant is investing in the ants and supporting the ant colony instead of making chemicals inside of itself for defence. [GL] Stebbins was a plant ecologist - he didn’t know anything about insects - but when he heard me talk he realised that my ants were the equivalent of nicotine or morphine or opium or caffeine.”

“When the paper was originally submitted to Science – which was probably in 1997, I am not sure exactly – it was rejected without review. At that time, I had intended to just let it go, but another colleague of mine at Santa Cruz by the name of Bruce Lyon, who is a behavioural ecologist, changed my mind. I happened to give a lecture to his class about this work. Bruce thought it was interesting and asked me where it would be submitted at the end of my lecture. I told him what had happened with Science and he urged me to challenge the decision, because he felt it was very important work. I had him look at the paper, he made a couple of suggestions, and I resubmitted the paper with a letter requesting that they re-evaluate it. And they reviewed and accepted it.”

“When we started to work on them our goal was to see how flexible this tool use was, and how sensitive it was to the needs of the task. In order to do that we placed two wires, one which was bent and one which was straight, on top of a vertical tube which contained a bucket in the bottom. We were trying to see if they [New Caledonian crows] would pick up the bent one to collect the bucket. In the experiment we had two individuals close together – a male and a female. The male was bigger and dominant over the female. What happened was the male picked the bent wire and took it away. The female, Betty, was left with only the straight wire with which she tried to retrieve the bucket but failed. What she then did was to basically jam the wire against the base of the tube and bend it [...] the first observation was made by my student Alex Weir, who became the first author of that report. Alex Weir had started his PhD six months earlier and so this was practically his first experiment [...] one day he came to us with this video. He said: well, my experiment didn’t work as planned because one of the crows took away the bent wire! Then this is what happened. And he showed us the video of Betty bending the wire. When I saw that I was completely bowled over. It was unbelievable.”

“When you feed a monkey group, the dominant monkey will try to grab everything. To avoid that, you hold a treat in one hand, off to the side, and try to tempt the dominant monkey over there, while not letting him have it and simultaneously feeding the other monkeys with the other hand. I was doing that with the peanuts and the dominant male, Ozzie, finally got frustrated with this. He ran back to the inside area of their enclosure and came back with a piece of monkey chow. He pushed it through the fence at me and tried to get the peanut. When I didn’t give it to him, he went back inside, where they had just gotten their fruit and vegetable trays, and returned with an orange peel. Then he did the same thing, pushing the orange peel through the fence at me. Again, I didn’t give him the peanut. Then he went inside again and came out with a whole quarter of an orange, which is quite large, of course, and he pushed that through the fence to me. I finally gave him the peanut, but it got me thinking, because I was relatively certain that if I walked up to Ozzie and offered him a choice between a single peanut and quarter of an orange, he would chose the quarter of the orange. If so, it was possible that he wanted the peanut because everybody else was getting one. Now, oranges weren’t a terribly limited resource, because they had just gotten their fruit and vegetable tray, so he could have gone inside and gotten another orange. But it was a very interesting interaction, and I really wanted to know whether my thought was right.”