“We used wild-caught male three-spined sticklebacks that differed in the intensity of their red breeding coloration after we had transferred them each to a small tank equipped with nesting material. We showed them each a gravid female in a small tank positioned 5 min per day in front of each male’s tank to stimulate his motivation to build a nest and display. After all males had build nests and achieved a stable coloration, we asked students from a course that took place in the same building to estimate the degree of redness of each male and give one point for the dullest and 10 for the brightest. This is possible because humans and sticklebacks have three color receptors in their retina with the same range of sensitivity. So, sticklebacks see red in the same way as we do.”

“We were camping in tents in that preserve. From there, we drove to the field sites every day. We had a jeep that could go off road because it’s a very rough terrain. In the second year, there were two more students, in addition to me. We still had tents, but we’d also rented a small trailer that we could haul around and park in that station. We did our field trips from that station. In 2001, Ian Baldwin’s lab in Max Planck, started to put more trailers there, so that more students could be there. And we also had one horse trailer, which is really funny. The trailers that transport horses are a little bit larger, and so, we turned one of those horse trailers into our scientific trailer, which had a lab in there. This was in 2000. When we saw how important plant volatile emission is, Ian Baldwin bought a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer that we put into that trailer. And then we put, I think, two four-squaremeter solar panels up, on which we ran the GCMS. [...] There’s a lot of sun light, since it is the desert, and we were able to run a GCMS off of solar panels. It was really impressive and it is still there. It grew more and more, and, now, there’s almost a little village of little trailers that facilitate the work of the researchers there.”

“We were, originally, doing playback experiments with a variety of audio equipment [...] sometimes we used a public-address horn speaker, sometimes we used a whacking great cabinet speaker, of the sort you had at a rock concert. So, we were carrying these around the field. Well, that’s another area where things have improved. In order to get decent quality, we were having to carry big speakers, big amplifiers, and whopping great car batteries or lorry batteries to power them. So it was quite a major business. And I think, today, one would be able to get much better playback with much lighter hand-held equipment using lithium-ion battery technology.”

“What’s interesting is that when I went to Panama these were not called Tungara frogs. They were called mud-puddle frogs. And then I asked a Panamanian if there is a Panamanian name for the frogs. He said ‘Tungara’. The word is onomatopoetic. Tungara sounds like a whine and two chucks – Tooon ga ra. Later, after I started to use that name, I found a field guide to the frogs of Nicaragua where the author independently was also calling this frog Tungara.”

“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. I practiced and improved my skill at feather manipulation at the lab before going to Kenya for the study. During manipulations in the field, the assistant sat in front of me holding the bird, while I cut, trimmed and glued the tail feathers.”

“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.”

“Working in growth chambers is much more difficult than working in the field. Three in the morning, something would breakdown and you have to run in there. The rain would go off at the wrong time and we had to figure out why. Or there would be a power surge and the lights would blow. I slept at the station many nights just nursing the thing through. We had set “the sun to go down” in the middle of the day, so if I wanted to get there at “sunrise” that would be two a.m. So, I just slept in the office most of the time.”

“Yes, I still remember that day in an ash tree! Butterflies defending sunspot territories sat on low perches, often on brambles or other leaves in the ground layer. Butterflies that were intruding came down from the canopy. I noticed that the canopy males searched for females in a different way. Whereas the sun spot males perched in the sunshine and waited to inspect things that passed by, the ones up in the canopy were patrolling. The canopy was more or less completely in the sun, so perhaps the best thing to do was to just patrol around and try and find females by active search. On days that were cloudy, but still warm enough for the butterflies to be active, I noticed that all the butterflies were in the canopy patrolling. These different tactics for searching for females were fascinating. What I wanted to test was why patrolling males were so keen to get sun spot vacancies that arose. Was the woodland floor the best place to look for females? This is why I sat up in a tree all day! I simply scored the number of females that visited sun spot territories below, and the number of females that I saw being harassed by patrolling males above in the canopy where I was sitting. I found that the sun spot males encountered many more females than the canopy ones. Though statistically the evidence wasn’t very strong, together with the behaviour of the males, it convinced me that the males were competing for best places to look for females. Another very important finding was that because territory vacancies arose frequently, most of my canopy males got a sunspot territory in the end. This suggested to me that a sun spot wasn’t an incredibly valuable resource, unlike my pied wagtails where only a small proportion of the population held territories. Here, it was almost like seats on a bus – everybody had a turn, if only they waited patiently for a little bit.”