“John Thompson was the one who invited me to participate in a symposium on the geographic mosaic of co-evolution for the American Society of Naturalists. The society has a vice-presidential symposium every year, and John was the vice president. He was very encouraging. I thought my work didn’t fit very well in the symposium but John convinced me otherwise. He is also a big advocate of my work, which I very much appreciate.”

“Kaoru [Kitajima] was a physiological ecologist. She invited me to use her lab rather than just running around with my van - my lab on wheels - and so I set up shop in her lab and collaborated with her on a related paper [...] she also let me stay in her house when she would be off working in the tropics in Panama. She ended up being my local host there and became a good friend.”

“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!). He also collected some of the provisioning data we used in our analyses during his time working with Nick in the 1980s.”

“Monte [Lloyd] was on my thesis committee and was incredibly helpful and inspiring to me as a naive graduate student (I didn’t realize at the time how unusual it was for Monte to fly from Chicago to Philadelphia to attend my committee meetings and exams).”

“Nirmal Kumar lived with his family right in the center of the home range of one of the troops of langur monkeys that I was studying. He was a dedicated and knowledgeable bird watcher who took great interest both in the monkeys themselves (some of whom he knew as individuals) and in my observations about them. Later, I also met Mona Ali, the wife of Aftab, a professor at the local police academy whose home fell within the home range of another of the groups. [...] Almost as important as their generous friendship to a stranger in a strange country, was their communications about unusual events in the lives of the monkeys I was studying that they happened to witness in their front yards.”

“People were very friendly and we shared equipment across groups and even departments. For example, the algae I needed to feed the Daphnia was produced by a group in genetics department.”

“That first year I stayed at the ecological reserve where Cris [Sandoval] was working. She hosted me, and gave me a bit of lab space. In fact, I also had lab space from her former PhD supervisor, whose name is John Endler. He was a professor in Santa Barbara. John gave me a bit of space in the back of the lab where I could have the insects and run my mating trials and do this kind of thing.”

“The Evolutionary Biology department at Princeton was, and still is, an extremely friendly and supportive environment. I remember emailing the entire department to ask if anyone has any sort of CPU time. This is before the time of using supercomputers. I was just running this on laptops and desktops, and I was fortunate to get 10 or 12 people who wrote back to me and said, you are welcome to use my computer. I was running around to different buildings, putting my executables on as many machines I could get hold of, and then running around collecting the data as they would come in, to get enough computational power to do the required analysis.”

“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 paper was much longer in print than is normal for QRB [Quarterly Review of Biology], which imposed page charges. I was a poor graduate student who could not pay them. My PhD committee and some other faculty generously agreed to support me, and it cost them several thousands of dollars of their research budgets to do so. Those contributing included Con Wehrhahn, Bill Neill, Don McPhail, and Buzz Holling. Tom Northcote, Peter Larkin, and Charlie Krebs may have chipped in as well.”

“The University of Florida had excellent facilities for analyzing soil. It’s a public land-grant institution with a large Agricultural Science component. I did all of the soil analyses in the UF soil testing laboratory. They taught me how to do the analyses. Tom Sinclair, who was in Agronomy (and a colleague of Missy Holbrook) helped me with the bureaucracy. That simplified everything. It would have been would have been very difficult to set up all of those analytical procedures at Harvard. At the University of Florida, it was all set up; I just had to learn the protocols and run them on my samples.”

“There was also a butterfly ecologist at Davis – Arthur Shapiro - [who] was always generous, and would often come back from the field and give us butterflies for the colonies.”

“There were some rather personal, patronizing attacks as well, from some others, but my friends supported me through it. It was very hard for me, to tell you the truth. I’m not used to personal attacks, but Carsten Rahbek and Nick Gotelli were my steadfast supporters and co-authors, and we wrote two papers defending MDEs [Mid-Domain Effects], in Am Nat in 2004 and 2005. They still think MDE is worthwhile.”

“They [PhD supervisors] didn’t want to be [authors] – times have changed. I started with Robin Foster who had a very hands-off approach. So, I felt the thesis I designed was very much my own. But he gave me the confidence that it was perfectly feasible to work in the tropics. So off I went. He left academics while I was in the field, and the newly hired Doug Schemske probably felt he had no choice but to take in this orphan, warts and all. We had overlapped some on BCI [Barro Colorado Island] and he commented on how hard I worked. Poor Doug took on the responsibility of reading my painful, weekly progress on writing up my thesis. Without him, I would never have turned it into something as professional or compelling. I am very grateful to both of them for their different, but extremely valuable gifts.”

“This is a paper I cared about very much and for which we sought feedback. Several colleagues read the manuscript and provided important advice. Mainly, people I was acquainted with during my Californian days. I had only recently realized how critical writing properly was and how much I needed to improve. Many of the colleagues cited in the acknowledgments are really master writers and helped very much in those years to improve my writing skills.”

“When applying to graduate school, I was fortunate enough to stumble across “that guy who did the starfish study”, Bob Paine at the University of Washington, and made it into his lab. Bob was a strong believer in students maintaining an independent intellectual identity as a way both to increase the marketability of his students upon graduation and to increase the intellectual and methodological breadth and perspective of his lab. Therefore, he actively discouraged students from working directly on any of his own projects and did not engage in slapping his name on his students’ papers, so he published very few papers with his students. I try to maintain this approach in my own lab, as Bob was remarkably successful at producing graduates who went on to faculty positions of their own.”

“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.”