“I have no reason to doubt the results, but Rechten et al. 1981 Anim. Behav. 29, 1276-77 corrected the theory, and Berec et al. 2003 Can. J. Zool. 81, 780 were unable to repeat the results in toto.”

“I haven’t thought of anything. I mean, like I said, there is still a lot which is unexplained here, but I haven’t seen anything that contradicts, or finds a completely different explanation for, our results. Except for very long distance flights. I don’t know if anyone has really found other cues that bees could be using when they fly large distances.”

“I hope they will take away the connection between ecological theory and observation and their relevance to practical management. The results in this paper were vitally important in managing at least two threatened species of bird – the alala or the Hawaiian crow and the spotted owl. That is much clearer in the PNAS paper. But the ideas that these small populations are only going to last a few years and that they are probably going to last a little bit longer if the species are larger-bodied are actionable results. This is science that can make a difference. So, I think it is the connection between theory, an extraordinary and exceptional dataset and the application to real-world problem, is what students should really be taking away from reading this paper.”

“I invented those terms in my book, and they caught on. I realized that Ed Wilson was very good at inventing terms, you know, going back to “pheromone” and “sociobiology” and lots of other terms, and I needed descriptive terms to capture a concept and make people think about it. One way to do this is to create terms that everybody finds useful as shorthand for the concept. They’re not perfect, because they are too short and they can’t really capture the variety of meaning. But, you know, "dispersal assembly" and "niche assembly" captured some of the elements that I needed to help organize discussion and thinking about community ecology.”

“I learned a tremendous amount in writing it. It was over two years I spent writing that paper and doing that research. And I enjoyed testing the limits of the editors to see how much humour or salacious metaphor or whatever I could put in the paper. And I had the sense that the paper was going to be influential simply because previous critiques that had tried to assess the frequency of statistical problems in the literature never told the authors of the papers they were criticizing that they were being criticized. They didn’t cite them! And so I thought that aspect alone would get people’s attention quickly.”

“I look back on it and I see how we did things in the past, which was very different from how we do things now. That is not, necessarily, meant to criticize the paper, but rather to illustrate that we are learning as we go. I, sometimes, do that with students. I point out how we do things very differently now and how, maybe, in the past, we did some things that we now consider “wrong” – particularly in terms of statistics. But then, I emphasize the point that this was the best that we could do then. It’s good to look at papers very critically, but you should also always look at them from this more historical perspective. This is, of course, difficult if you’re a very young and naive reader; you don’t have this perspective. And that might, sometimes, make our students very critical, maybe more critical than what they should be. But, certainly, I sometimes look back at these papers, partly nostalgically, but also partly to understand how we did things in the past and how we have improved the way we do our research.”

“I lost almost 50% of my plots to accidents of one kind or another – the owner of the field site changed their mind, there was a storm, there was too much rain, the city decided to put a water pipeline through the middle of my plot! I mean all kinds of things; I lost a lot. If I was advising a student today about doing this kind of fieldwork research I would advise them to set up a lot of plots and anticipate that a big number of them – 50% of them – are going to be destroyed over the next two years.”

“I remember being at a meeting of the Evolution Society, and there was a whole symposium on Niche Theory. I remember thinking, gee, there is symposium on that, and remarking to myself, I used to be active in that area.”

“I think I would tell the student to read this as one of the early studies trying to understand how coevolving interactions may diversify ecologically across landscapes, knowing that it doesn’t have everything that you would want in a full study of this sort. To really understand that, you need to read the subsequent studies from our lab and from other labs for what you need for true tests of geographic mosaic. This study, though, helped to show that coevolving interactions vary ecologically and evolutionarily among ecosystems, and it helped to show that, with hard work, it is possible to study these mosaics in nature, which are the fuel for the relentlessness of evolutionary and coevolutionary change.”

“I think it [the paper] stood up pretty well. I’d say I definitely had a fondness for optimal foraging theory at the time, that I’m a little less enthralled with now; but only a little! We didn’t really engage that much in some of the evolutionary causes of this as much as I might now. I think thinking about things like gene flow and other forms of negative frequency dependence – there’s a variety of things that could generate and sustain this individual variation, some of which are adaptive, some of which are non adaptive. I think I would have expanded on that. It’s a long paper already, but I certainly could envision writing more on that at the time.”

“I think it has stood the test of time and other people who have done similar things have found similar patterns. So yes, the main conclusion still stands.”

“I think it is very difficult to think back what it was like before we had smart phones, or before there was PCR. Nowadays, everybody lives life as if we’ve always had smart phones or email or internet. And I think it is difficult for them to see what science was like 30 years ago. I know, because these methods aren’t used anymore, it’s hard for them to imagine that you can sequence DNA with radioactivity. Why would you do that? You can do it with fluorescence now. So, I view this a little bit as a lesson of how –Avery or Watson or Crick or whoever – how they worked in a generation or two before me, to try to imagine what that was like and what the data were like and how cumbersome it was to get only a little bit of new information. I think this is maybe a lesson in that, that it’s difficult to understand, from a young student’s perspective, in particular, how these kinds of technical advances really contributed to progress in science generally and to better understanding the patterns and processes that describe and shaped biological diversity on our planet.”

“I think it’s quite a self-contained piece. Maybe it will be good to read it together with the 2003 review. And then, of course, you know, nowadays there are much later and kind of like more up-to-date reviews of work that obviously couldn’t exist back then. But I still think that people tend to think that it makes a point that can be understood, by reading it just like that.”

“I think most of what we said still stands.”

“I think students today must see the paper in context. This was the very first attempt to see if stable isotopes could be used to model whole complex food webs. Before this paper, there really was no straightforward modeling of food webs using stable isotopes. All new and original and aimed at the “big picture” or overview. As I indicate below, technology at the time was also not what it is today and so sample sizes were often limited. Students have a much more convenient means of using stable isotopes in their research today. I would also say that the approach was not without its risks of failure and so it can pay to take chances in planning research questions.”

“I think that paper was definitely a product of its time context. And so, there are pretty clear references in there to different processes of speciation – vicariant speciation versus ecological speciation. I think, sometimes that, those debates, which were very current at the time, may not be so current now. So, it’d be very useful for somebody reading this paper, to be familiar with, you know, what the cladistic biogeographic school was doing and what the Endler Group, which was pushing ecological speciation at that time, was doing. It would help to have that context of what were the big issues and the big discussions at that time. That would be the main point.”

“I think that some of the main messages that are in my paper are all over the literature today. So from that perspective, if you are a student reading it, I don’t think you will be so surprised by it, because you are also reading it in so many other papers today. Of course, the newer papers also have more data and more sophisticated analysis.”

“I think that this 1983 paper does tell a story as it happened in a good historical context. It came out at a time that was really exciting. We published a more extensive follow-up cheetah study in Science in 1985 (227:1424) which is complementary. Interesting to me was that in the same 1985 issue of Science, right next to our cheetah study was the first description of the BLAST algorithm, written by David Lipman, soon to become the founding director of the National Center for Biological information – NCBI – which hosts the GenBank database. Lippman’s BLAST algorithm was like back to back with our study. We laugh about that whenever we get together, about how young we were and how important those two papers were. Time passes.”

“I think that this conclusion has stood the test of time in this system and in others. Andre Kessler and Ian Baldwin were somewhat skeptical of the result and repeated the basic experiment using a different sagebrush subspecies and wild tobacco in Utah. Their findings confirmed our results and added priming as a mechanism that we were not aware of. More recently, I conducted a meta-analysis with Louie Yang and Kyle Edwards of published and unpublished studies that examined volatile communication between plants of other species. This meta-analysis revealed that communication resulting in induced resistance is a widespread phenomenon, although it was not found in all systems. I believe that plants are under strong selection to evaluate their risk of being eaten. The most reliable cue of future herbivory is probably direct damage to the plant and this is the cue that has been described most commonly in studies of induced resistance. In addition to direct damage, many plants perceive volatile cues that are emitted by neighboring tissues of the same individual or neighboring individuals; to the extent that these cues provide reliable information about future risk, plants will be selected to respond to them. However, volatiles are not the only cues that can be perceived and offer reliable information.”

“I think that’s the main takeaway, but I think associated with that is the idea, which was novel at the time, that this was a consequence of inevitable correlations between the capacity to roar and your muscle condition and strength. So, it’s not purely just an observational paper that suggests that animals are competing by roaring. It’s also associated with ideas as to why this should be the case. And I would think that both of those hold.”