“[Labroides dimidiatus] was already the best-studied species. I knew a lot about their behaviour, and also the Red Sea is the nearest coral reefs we have from Europe. In the Red Sea, there’s a research station in Egypt. I went and had a look, and that’s where I found exactly the kind of habitat that I wanted – you have these patch reefs surrounded by sand, where you can then distinguish between species that stay at the patch, and so are residents, and species that switch between patches, and so are visitors with access to several cleaning stations. That’s exactly what I was looking for. So I had everything in Egypt, only four hours flight away. Australia was 30 hours of flight time!”

“[Scolopsis bilineatus] is very common, and relatively easily to catch and keep in the lab. So, it was just a convenient species”

“P. fluorescens SBW25 is nothing special. As I’d gone from PhD to first postdoc to second postdoc, I continued my interest in phenotypic variation and I just switched to use whatever bacterium was the main focus of the lab. What the lab eventually did was to release a genetically marked version of SBW25 into a field setting. And the field that had been chosen was a sugar beet field because there were sugar beet plots at the university farm. These bacteria you find commonly associated, or always associated, with plant leaves and plant roots. So there’s no particular reason for choosing it other than, you know, the lab that I joined was already focused on this bacterium.”

“After my PhD, I was looking for a new topic, an emerging field within the area of Evolutionary Biology. The evolution and ecology of host – parasite interactions was an emerging field and in particular there was a need to work experimentally. There was plenty of theory and many open questions, but a lack of good experimental systems to answer them. I knew Daphnia very well from my PhD work, so I decided that I will try to develop this system for work on host – parasite interactions.”

“Although Darwin first suggested that the peacock’s train had evolved as a result of female choice, no one had tested this idea. I was working at Whipsnade Park on a study of Chinese water deer, and, whilst staying overnight in the park, noticed the free-ranging peacocks displaying in groups (lekking). I thought that it would be feasible to study the peacocks at Whipsnade (that it would be relatively easy to catch and mark them) and test Darwin’s hypothesis.”

“At the time, [Botrylloides violaceus] was one of the most dominant invaders in the area. And it was one that seemed to escape predation by some of the natives, at an earlier stage than some of the natives did. I think that those were the reasons why we focused on that. It also happens to be bright orange, and it’s really easy to identify, and it doesn’t look like anything else in the area. It’s certainly visually arresting. It’s pretty obvious when it’s there. There’s no way to mistake it.”

“Corree Flats occurred to me [as a possible study site] because I knew of Ross Pengilley’s ecological research there, on skinks.”

“Cuckoos parasitize several hosts across the UK. In moorlands, up in Scotland and in the West Country, there is a genetic race that parasitizes meadow pipits. The genetic race of cuckoo we have here in the Fens lays a green egg, and they go for reed warblers. Actually, of all the hosts that cuckoos go for, reed warblers are the easiest to study, simply because their nests are easy to find.”

“Experimental testing of a conspicuous male ornament potentially involved in female choice was not a far-fetched approach. In fact, I had been thinking about this possibility for a long time, but then with the epitome of male ornaments in mind: the train of the peacock. I explored possibilities for doing such a field experiment during a visit to Sri Lanka in 1979, but found that such a study of peacocks in the wild would be difficult for several reasons. The lek sites I found in a national park were in jungle with plenty of elephants and wild buffalo around; not an ideal situation. In addition, manipulating trains of unwilling peacocks in the wild seemed to present some problems of its own.”

“For practical reasons, I caught three-spined stickleback from ponds behind Bochum University where I did my dissertation. Sticklebacks were easy to get and they were already a model organism for behaviour research since Tinbergen’s Nobel Prize winning studies.”

“Gray Merriam was my MSc thesis supervisor. He had experience working with Peromyscus leucopus which is the reason I selected that species for the field study.”

“Henry Wilbur’s research at the time was focused on amphibians in the Sandhills, so much of my early field experience in graduate school involved visiting ponds with Henry and his other students, sampling the ponds to see what lived there, and learning about what was common and rare. One thing was obvious: newts were abundant and nearly ubiquitous. They were the top predator, or one of the top predators, in most ponds. That made them a logical thing to study. There was also a high diversity of frogs breeding in the ponds, which made the question of what allowed so many ecologically similar species able to coexist an interesting one.”

“I applied to several graduate programs, got into all but one of them, and decided to study at Duke with Henry Wilbur, who was a rising star in the field. Henry mostly worked with amphibians then, so that led me to work on amphibians too.”

“I basically go by what’s available and I’m interested in just about any behaviour. Whatever catches my eye, that’s what I go for. I don’t care if it’s bees or beetles or birds.”

“I came to the University of Michigan determined to “figure out” coloration in birds and by extension ornamentation in animals generally. I decided to focus on carotenoid coloration, which was almost unstudied in birds at the time, because of an obscure statement in an Ornithology text by Joel Welty: “Canaries will, in successive molts, gradually change from yellow to intense orange if fed red peppers.” Condition dependent sexual signaling was a new and exciting topic in behavioral ecology when I read that statement about canary coloration in the early 1980s. The prospect of diet-dependent coloration sounded intriguing to me. Then, when I went to the literature to find out more about carotenoid coloration in birds, I found a paper published in 1976 in The Auk on pigmentation in House Finches. In that paper, Alan Brush and Dennis Power used thin layer chromatography to identify the carotenoid pigments in house finches, one of the first characterizations of carotenoid pigments in feathers in any bird. House finches were an invasive species in Michigan, having just colonized the area a few years before I arrived in Ann Arbor, and they seemed to be a perfect study bird. So, in 1987, I started capturing wild house finches and visually quantifying their feather coloration.”

“I did the study near Ottawa simply because that is where I was living.”

“I found the snakes while I was turning over logs and rocks to catch lizards (usually in the early morning, when the ground was cold and the reptiles were slow). They were a convenient size for lab trials on predation, and not venomous enough to be a risk.”

“I framed two studies for my post-doc: one on costs of reproduction, and one on the evolution of viviparity (live-bearing). For logistical reasons, I wanted to do the two studies on the same system.”

“I had already visited small islands in the Gulf of Maine, north of Boston, where I had looked at [...] ground beetles. I had recognised that each island had a different number of species and a somewhat different set of species, and I thought it might be possible to remove them to test the theory. But I quickly realised, that winter, that I wouldn’t be able to census them for half the year. The seas were too rough and the weather was unbelievable. The islands were often covered with snow. Ed [Wilson], who had visited the Florida Keys said: “What about these little mangrove islands in the Florida Keys?” I went down there and looked, then he came down and looked with me, and we decided that they were about the right size.”

“I had never been to the tropics, but envisioned tenting by myself in the upper Amazon. My PhD advisor, Robin Foster, who had lots of experience in the tropics, suggested I work on BCI [Barro Colorado Island], the premier field station of its day. That didn’t sound so glamorous, but he was of course right. The logistics of remote tenting are enormous, and there is no one to talk to. On BCI, I was profoundly inspired by watching more senior scientists do science.”