“Our study area was a remote place about one hour drive by gravel roads from the nearest civilized place with food stores, telephone, and so on. We were housed there at a decaying, century old house that had previously been the abode of forest wardens, which played the role of modest field station in the middle of nowhere. No telephone, no heating system, no warm water, roof leaks, terribly uncomfortable beds, but the evening meetings in front of the fire place were an unbeatable pleasure that compensated for these and other inconveniences.”

“Tatoosh Island, which is owned by the Makah Tribe, was Bob Paine’s primary study site, and he encouraged his students to explore possible projects there. It took no salesmanship on his part to convince me to work on Tatoosh. Because of the cool moist environment, the timing of low tide events relative to stressful air conditions, the high wave action, and the minimal direct human impact, the species diversity and abundance on Tatoosh is spectacular compared to other shores that I have visited. And the isolation of the island ensures that equipment and experiments are not disturbed by curious visitors, so it is an ideal site to do research. My first visit to the island in November 1984 is probably still the most memorable. I got to fly out by helicopter, and once there I was awed by all the eagles, peregrine falcons and marine mammals I saw, along with all the shore life. And the trip was punctuated by the appearance of a dead humpback whale on the beach, which had decayed enough internally that its bones were disgorged when the tide washed it back out to sea the next day. I had a cursory introduction to Simon’s Landing (our informal name of the site after a famous theoretical ecologist fell from the top of the overlooking cliff and nearly killed himself; I have not learned of any formal name of the site from the indegenous Makah Tribe who own the island) from afar on my first visits, but little work was being done there at the time, because of the difficult access down/up the cliff to get to it and the winter tidesare at night, so it was hard to see what was there. When taking classes at Friday Harbor Laboratories the following spring, I saw the broadcast of the shoreline episode of David Attenborough’s Living Planet series. Although there was no cable TV available and viewing the segment was like looking through a violent blizzard because of poor antenna reception, when the segment on rocky shorelines appeared I could make out this fantastic uniform sloping rock bench with strong patterns of zonation that the show was using as its representative rocky shore, and I said to myself “wow, that spot would be a really great study site!” That site turned out to be Simon’s Landing, and I turned out to be right. We typically visit Tatoosh, which is only accessable with permission of the Makah Tribe, for 4-5 days every 2 weeks between April and September. For most trips, we land through the surf in a small zodiac boat, and live out of two small buildings that lack running water and have minimal power provided by a solar panel. Summer tides are in the early morning, so we wake up around 5 am, work until around noon, then do research and camp maintenance (clearing trails, preparing equipment, transcribing data, read literature, review manuscripts, etc.) for the rest of the day, all the while keeping our eyes and ears open for interesting birds and other aspects of nature.”

“That first summer, we rented two rooms in the home of a local school master who together with his family became good friends. I still correspond with his daughter. Ideally, I would wake up before dawn, walk to the sleeping trees where I had left monkeys the evening before, and follow them on and off until evening.”

“The Arctic can be an unforgiving place. Keith’s supervisor, Malcolm Ramsay, died tragically in a helicopter crash, along with another close friend and colleague. Subsequently, Marty Bergmann, who learned his stuff as my graduate student, died in another plane crash in Resolute, after becoming head of the Polar Continental Shelf Program (PCSP) that supports Arctic research. Once, Keith [Hobson], I and two others were returning in a seven meter boat, from Devon Island about sixty miles away, when the fog rolled in. We navigated through the ice as best we could and finally, just about out of gas, we drove up onto the sea ice to spend the night, without a clue as to where we were. But the fog lifted several meters and I recognized an island where I’d built an iglu, and we made it home on fumes that evening. It was routine, but it made a big impression on Keith.”

“The engineers had those devices, what do you call them...pagers, they had pagers. And the Ecotron would actually automatically buzz them if there was a problem. The three engineers would be on call, in rotation. When they were on call, they were not allowed to drink. And to tell a British person that he can’t go to the pub is pretty hard on him. If the pager went off in the middle of the night, because the machine was overheating or something, whoever was on call would have to come in to trouble shoot. Some of it they could try to control remotely, or sometimes I would get a call – we have an alarm going off in chamber 6, could you just go and take a look to see if it’s a false alarm? If I was there I would run up and check, but if nobody was there they would have to come all the way in, sometimes only to find out it was a false alarm. But it could be quite serious – if the machine started to overheat, all of a sudden, 100 days into a 200-day experiment, you could lose the whole thing, because heat could over-stress the plants, insects, worms, snails, and all the other organisms in the chambers.”

“The first time we submitted it, we had the mitochondrial DNA sequence data, and the reviewers wanted us to add data from a nuclear gene – to substantiate the phylogenetic patterns. Now, this seems crazy in today’s day and age – because we’re sequencing whole genomes – but back then it was still the time where you wanted to have more than one gene to build your phylogeny. And so, what I tried to do in the lab was to get a nuclear gene working, basically, with PCR. But I’m not very good at lab work, so my reactions were failing. I had good DNA, I had the mitochondrial sequence, and I just needed to get some nuclear sequence data to revise the manuscript; I couldn’t do it. And Steve [Springer] was very good at lab work and molecular biology. Actually, I didn’t know about this. He just ran a PCR with my primers and did the reaction for me, one night, and when I came in the morning, there was a gel with all the bands showing that the reaction had worked. I had to do more samples after that, but in the beginning, we weren’t sure if the problem was me, or if the problem was the reagents or the primers or something else. But what Steve did was confirmed that really the problem was me!”

“The group of us met weekly, we divvied up projects and we started figuring out how we go about doing this. How do we gather the data, how do we extract the data, how do we ask the questions in a quantitative way? This took a lot of collaborative work and a lot of thinking and creativity on everyone’s part. Everyone was very critical for the success of that project. And we worked on it for a long time. It took us about a year; we had a lot of frustration, a lot of humour. Some of the humour was when we could not figure out what people had done in their studies. You know, they didn’t report their data in a way we could use it and we said, “What we need to do is we need to commission the services of a statistical psychic to understand what was in these papers!" We just had a lot of fun with it, we worked very hard, and we finally put this big paper together. One of the ideas that I had was: if meta-analysis was going to be introduced to ecology, it should be introduced in an important way – take a very important topic that a lot of people would be interested in, and something that would get a lot of attention, because otherwise people would ignore that this was something that was an important new tool that had broad applications. So that’s why we tackled such a big project. It was really very, very large and challenging to do that analysis. And of course, in those days, nothing was electronic. We were photocopying all the articles from, you know, from the print versions of the journals that we got at the university library and you know, doing things in a way that you wouldn’t do them now. And the statistics also is much more simplistic than what we would do nowadays.”

“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 lab was actually part of my room. I had brought everything I would need: hot plate, beakers, small spectrophotometer, mortar and pestle, table-top centrifuge. When I worked with acetone, I improvised a hood: I would balance the hotplate on the toilet and put a fan in the window. It was not wildly effective at eliminating fumes, but kept one alert to make sure the hotplate did not plunge into the lidless toilet.”

“The laboratory also provided accommodation and was located in the small hamlet of Resolute Bay. From that logistical base, our food web sampling was done from small powerboats locally and a larger research vessel the “Ogak” which is Inuit for “Arctic Cod”. Those sampling trips could be days to weeks. The seabird work was conducted primarily from remote field camps, from tents, and could last for weeks to months. Transport to those camps was by helicopter or Twin Otter. So, much of the work was logistically very challenging and involved lots of concerns about weather and polar bears!”

“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 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.”

“The trees were large. Most of them were Anacardium excelsum – a relative of cashew – and they tend to get very large hollows. Most of the hollows were big enough that I could go into the tree. One roost was in a silk cotton (Ceiba pentandra) tree that was so big that I could lie down completely inside the tree. Inside the hollow, yes. The diameter of the tree was about six feet inside, probably about 10 feet outside. So these were big trees. The bats would be at the top of the hollow, which, in most cases, was pretty high – probably twenty to thirty feet above where I was. So, I would actually lie on my back and observe them with binoculars. I tried to video record them with Super 8 mm film but that didn’t work very well. With a camera you are stuck in one location, but the bats move around a lot so I needed to move around too to keep track of them. We also had to wear respirators when making the observations. Histoplasmosis is a fungus that grows in bat guano, something I was very aware of and concerned about. So the students that helped me and I always wore these respirators. It was not easy. It was very tiring so I always had someone helping me. One person would call out observations and the other person would sit outside the tree and write them down. We also made little devices that would emit a click at set intervals of time, which we would listen for with earphones. I think for all the vampire work, I had set it to go off every 10 seconds. At every click we recorded whatever behaviour the bat was doing. I got the idea for this device from a primate field course I took as an undergraduate student at UC Davis. Davis is one of the eight places in the US that has a primate centre, where different species of monkeys or apes are kept in large outdoor enclosures. During that course we observed bonnet macaques in one such enclosure and recorded behaviours with the help of these clicking devices. You know, at the beginning I was not sure exactly what I was going to find. I just knew I needed to be systematic, be quantitative. I knew I wanted to study food sharing but I didn’t know how often I would see it, so it was done with some level of hope. The information from these focal animal samples was mainly used in a subsequent paper where I report on social grooming. The food-sharing was so infrequent that I recorded it whenever I saw it. It was so rare that if I had done it only on focal animals I would have had no data. In fact, in the first six months, I think I had seen it only a couple of times. At that point I was starting to think that the whole project was doomed. I think part of the issue was that – and this is not mentioned in any paper –in order to see the animals and identify them, I used coloured reflecting bands – bird bands, basically – on the wings of the bats. And to see the bands inside the tree I had to shine lights on them. Initially, the bats would always hide from the lights and so I couldn’t make any observations. In order to overcome that, I would, every single day, take a miner light into the tree and shine it on the bats continuously. These would last for 12 hours with rechargeable batteries, and the bats had nowhere to go, so in some time they got habituated to the lights. I could confirm this with a night vision scope which I could use with infra-red light. Infra-red light is invisible to bats. So when I compared their behaviour with the night vision scope and with the lights I couldn’t tell any difference. But it took months.”

“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 a British Ecological Society (BES) meeting happening around that time, for which abstracts were due eight months in advance. We were only maybe halfway through the experiment, and John Lawton was already convinced that biodiversity wouldn’t matter that much. He said, as long as you had plants and herbivores, why would it really matter if you had two species or 16. But I was convinced of the opposite. I had no particularly empirical or theoretical basis for this – it was more a gut sense that diversity must matter. Anyway, by the time the abstract was due, nothing that had been measured was showing differences across treatments – nutrient loss, soil chemistry, growth rate, the total amount of standing biomass. So we sent in an abstract to BES which actually said that biodiversity didn’t matter! But at the meeting, which was 8 months later, when we had completed the experiments, I delivered a talk which said biodiversity did matter. Nobody seemed to notice that the title of the abstract was the other way around! The room was packed and it was the biggest lecture hall in the conference. I had never given a talk with so many people. Once, I gave a talk on the reproductive biology of a histophagus protozoan, and I think there were six people in the room. And they were all my friends! But at this talk I had to actually step over people to get to the podium. Everybody wanted to find out what we had found out in the Ecotron. Because it was controversial. It was a very expensive experiment, at a time when funding for research in England was pretty tight- right after Margaret Thatcher’s reign.”

“These were some of my happiest days as a biologist, mainly due to the wide-ranging discussions Nick and I had about biology as we sat for long hours in our deckchairs and counted provisioning rates at the warbler nests. I also spent a lot of time in a shed used by the ringers at Wicken Fen. This was less fun, but made more enjoyable by regular visits from Ralph, an old Fen man who kept geese and ducks in the neighbouring field and who always had a good story to tell (“Saw a baby mink today. Got it with my pitchfork”). The shed was also well-positioned for access to the ice-cream van. Mike Brooke is the Strickland Curator of Ornithology at the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology. He did the field experiments on cuckoos and reed warblers with Nick Davies in the 1980s that have now become classic papers in the field of co-evolution, setting the benchmark for quality in this research area and laying the foundations for all the cuckoo work done since. Mike helped out by finding nests and letting me sit in his freezing cold kitchen to measure nestling begging behaviour (The chicks were fine because we kept them in heated nests but I had to keep popping outside to warm up!).”

“These were very long and incredibly exciting days. It was more than 13 islands. The 13 were just the N-S transect, but I also measured an E-W transect and worked on many other islands away from both transects. Many of the rocky reefs and islands were very far away from my host institution, the Tanzania Fisheries Research Institute (TAFIRI) in Nyegezi. I had a 7m long fiberglass canoe with a 25HP outboard engine. Travel time to the islands ranged from under an hour to more than 4 hours (some were even further away and required overnight trips, but these were not part of the transects). We had to leave very early in the morning, usually between 4 and 6am, to have sufficient time for the fieldwork at the islands. You have to have the nets all set before 9am and take them in again before 12am. Around noon, the lake becomes very rough, such that it is impossible to drive a canoe around the rocks and take in nets. I stayed in a rental house in a village a few kilometres away from the institute. I rented a little car from a friend, a teacher at the nearby fisheries school (who later became the Director of Fisheries in Tanzania). I would get up around 4am (earlier for the very distant islands), drive a couple kilometres to pick up my field assistance from their home, then to the institute at the lake. We would load the boat with all the field equipment in pitch-dark night. Electricity got cut in the evening after 8pm and would not return until well into the morning. We filled our boat with boxes, with fishing nets, a large cooler box to keep fish, buckets, diving equipment, photographic equipment, spectrophotometer etc. The mornings on the lake were beautiful; usually the lake is very calm at that time of the day and the sunrise is spectacular. The lake is huge, larger than Switzerland, so it is like being on the ocean. We aimed at arriving at islands at 8am and the first job was to take spectrophotometric light measurements. It was important to take these measurements at the same time at all islands. I also wanted clear skies, to have similar sunlight conditions at each island. I had built a large wooden box with polysterol filling and a bright red plastic foil around it to hold my laptop and the spectrometer. I had a 10m long optical fibre cable. This was usually lying on the floor of the boat. It had a heavy industrial coating, but I still managed to break it once! Measuring took some 30 minutes if everything went well, but the software was quite unstable and I often had to reboot and repeat (actually the software to make the spectrophotometer communicate with the laptop was so difficult that I was about to fail getting it to work at all, was it not for the help of my friend Laurent Assembe, a grad student in electro engineering, who managed to get it all working the night before I flew to Tanzania). After measuring the aquatic light spectra, we would set nets. I would record the water depth every few meters and make drawings in my field books showing net position. Then my field assistants would go fishing for inshore and crevice-dwelling cichlid species with hook and line and I would go scuba diving to do visual surveys and transect counts. Just before noon we would pull the nets. Often times I would inspect the nets while scuba diving, and remove the most precious fish already under water and take them up in plastic bags to have them show their best colours. In turbid water areas, this was impossible because there were crocodiles and you would not see much under water at all. On a typical day we would identify several hundred cichlids, record depth at capture for each, and take live colour photos of many. It is important to know that the rare species in these rich assemblages come as singletons among many hundred that you inspect. So you really cannot afford to lose a single fish in the documentation process if you want to measure species richness. This is something I have often seen people overlook, but it stuck with me through the rest of my career and influenced my work on fish assemblages elsewhere too. We would return to the station in the late afternoon. I would drive my assistants to their homes and then start opening the big ice box which contained the catch, all sorted into small bags by net and capture depths. Processing the fish included confirming identification-relevant traits under a microscope, taking some morphological distances, taking tissue samples for genetic work, and preserving the fish in formalin. I don’t think I ever finished before 10 or 11pm, with the last 3 hours under oil lamp or candle light. Anna [Samwel], my wife to come, assisted me every night. She also often did stomach content analyses of some of the fish (those whose feeding habits I did not know yet) the next day while I went back to the lake again. None of this would have been possible had I not had the support from three tireless field assistants, Mhoja Kayeba, Mohamed Haluna and Ruben Enoka, and my wife Anna.”

“Tim [Clutton-Brock] and I worked closely, usually in the same room, and almost every day, including weekends and holiday, often from early morning to late evening. I performed the analyses and Tim did the writing, reading out loud as he progressed with me correcting. We were thought by one of his students to be arguing very loudly and that our relationship would not survive, but it was creative composition. I have never witnessed a closer collaboration.”

“We could only do experimental pollinations of those figs when individual figs (syconia) were in two specific stages: when some were releasing pollen-carrying wasps, and others were receptive to pollination. This was rare and you had to be ready for it. When we sensed that this was coming, we would take figs about to release wasps into the lab [...], and leave them in covered petri dishes. The wasps leave the figs, and mill around in the dish. The dish would then be taken into the field, and individual wasps picked up with a tiny paintbrush and placed on figs that looked receptive. If we were right (the wasps knew; we couldn’t tell), then the wasps would burrow into the fig.”

“We use a 10-meter pole with a clipper on the end to cut and collect cones. I’m not strong enough to do it by myself, but several of my students are. I’ve visited all these sites, and we just camp, usually in a campground or just out somewhere in the forest, and we work all day. And then, often, in the afternoon, we’ll go for a hike and write up field notes. And then repeat that day after day until we’re done.”