“The benefit of working on public land is you don’t need additional research permits that you would need on private lands. We just need a general research permit from the Bureau of Land Management which we had. And then you have a very large area where you can work, which, in this particular system, is very important because the burns are in different places every year, across a very large area.”

“The butterfly became federally protected in about 1988, leading to funding and political efforts that have since saved many of the serpentine sites in the study region from development. However, this protection also meant that research on the butterfly became constrained by both the need for permits and the heightened concerns of landowners. For those reasons, and also because commuting to the Bay Area for fieldwork would have been unpleasant, I decided, after beginning my faculty job at UC Davis in 1991, not to keep working in that region.”

“The field site was one of the University of California’s reserves, and when I started my PhD, I visited a number of these reserves to look for field sites. When I got there, I observed interesting sedge islands that served as habitat for a number of other perennial, vegetatively reproducing plants in the river channel. I did not know what I would do with them, but the numerous replicate islands composed of easily manipulated plants seemed like a promising start. I sometimes hear that people like this study because of the excellent match of the sedge islands to the questions, but it took over 18 months of working in the habitat for this connection to cross my mind.”

“The reason why I study barn swallows, and why many other people have joined this effort, is because they are extremely abundant, very easy to handle, very easy to observe and very easy to catch. This might not seem like important advantages to a non-biologist, but, believe me, there are very few organisms where you can catch individuals and follow them throughout their lives. There are many organisms, including Drosophila, where you can’t do this. They might be the wrong size, or if they are the right size, you never see them again once you have captured and tagged them. In summary, I think you can even call it laziness, to choose a species that is easy to study. But if you want to get robust results you have to pick a model system that is easy to work on.”

“The wild tobacco plant grows in habitats of the Great Basin Desert, of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. And this particular site, Lytle Preserve, is owned by Brigham Young University. They had a little station to which you could go back every evening after work. And because this was already established, pretty much in the middle of the habitat where wild tobacco plants grow, this was a straightforward choice. You have to consider that wild tobacco plants grow only when the late succession vegetation, which is a sagebrush-dominated community of plants, is burnt down. Tobacco is one of the pioneer plants that comes after a wildfire destroys the original vegetation. And so, you’re dealing with a situation where you have to find a new population every year. Every time you go out for field research, you have to find that one burnt area where wild tobacco plants are growing. And so, you need some sort of field base from where you can go to all the places that potentially have wild tobaccos.”

“There was already domesticated tobacco – Nicotiana tabacum – as well as another species, Nicotiana benthamiana, an Australian tobacco plant that was a model system in genetic transformation research. These species were, already, Molecular Biology Genetics model systems. Therefore, another wild tobacco model has the benefit of being able to use all the molecular and genetic tools that were already developed for the other two species. You could readily do molecular biology and genetics on that plant. But, it could have been any wild tobacco plant. It just turned out that the person who started that, my former advisor, Ian Baldwin, had worked with this plant for his PhD thesis. And he continued working on his PhD model system, and at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, had this opportunity to take a wild species and turn it into a molecular and ecological and even physiological model system.”

“They were the closest rocky intertidal zones to my base in Tucson, Arizona.”

“This came about completely by chance. I had just finished my PhD, a study of the behaviour of a little bird, the pied wagtail. My pied wagtails defended territories along a river, and I noticed that every so often, a territory owner would leave his territory to feed elsewhere, particularly on days when there wasn’t much food on the territory. But periodically throughout the day, he would keep coming back to check if there was anyone intruding on his territory, and if there was, he would chase them off. I was very interested to know why he was doing this. I wondered if he was trying to prevent any newcomer spending sufficient time on the territory that it would get to learn its characteristics and, in effect, think this is a jolly nice place to live. If the owner came back periodically and chased off a newcomer before it had time to learn about the territory, it would be easier to get rid of him. To test this idea, I wanted to catch the owner and keep him away for a sufficient length of time for a newcomer to learn the characteristics of the territory, then put the original owner back and ask if he would then find it harder to win back the territory. I tried for a winter and failed completely simply because the birds were too hard to catch. I was then living in a little chalet in Wytham Woods, on the edge of Oxford, where David Lack started his famous studies of the great tit. I had a spare summer because I had just finished my thesis and my next job didn’t start till the autumn. This was 1976, so 40 years ago, and it was romantic living up in the woods. Every day was sunny which was highly unusual for England. People still remember that glorious summer. I think we had a three month spell with cloudless skies and the wood was full of butterflies. And I just noticed some butterflies doing little spiral flights in sunny patches, and I thought, well, that looks like territory defence. Maybe I can do the experiments on them instead of the wagtails because butterflies would be much easier to catch. [...] The whole thing came through natural history curiosity and serendipity, I guess.”

“This site was, literally, about 100 meters [away]. The marine station is right on the ocean, and the field site where we did this was right in front of the marine lab. It was very convenient. It was the sort of experiment that required intensive monitoring. It would have been very difficult to do if it were at some sort of remote field site, unless you went and camped there, right. But for a lot of the assembly and a lot of the figuring out some of the spawning we needed microscope access and those sorts of things. So, it would have been challenging to do at a remote field location.”

“This was an area in southern Britain, and we had two reasons to trap here. First, this was an area which had one of the highest densities of wintering birds from continental Europe. And second, this is an area with a lot of traps in the dunes, where it’s easy to post mist nets and drive the birds. The British people are very critical about mist-netting, and don’t allow it in their house gardens. In mid-England we have faced a lot of difficulties. But in these coastal areas it was very easy. So let’s say we had chosen the area for good practical reasons.”

“Well, to be honest, I have been happily married since 1977, and we spent very little of the first decade of our marriage in the same time zone. And so, when Bill got a job at Berkeley, and I, about 6 years later, was lucky enough to get a job there, I just decided to start working in California. There was also a little bit of carbon sensitivity. I would have loved, and I still may try, to do more work in the tropics or in the Midwest where the fish are more charismatic and diverse. Salmon biologists wouldn’t like to hear me say this, but there just isn’t the fish diversity west of the Rockies that there is in the Midwest or down in the tropics. I just wanted to study something local and to invest in where I lived, and also maybe not be flying round in jets and being away from home all the time.”

“When I arrived at my postdoc at the University of Connecticut, my postdoc advisor had been working on invasions, on these marine invertebrate communities that grow on piers and docks and whatnot. And they had a wonderful wealth of natural history information about all of these species, and they knew how to culture them and grow them in the field. They had just developed this movable tile apparatus, which was the technique that we ended up using to manipulate diversity in these experiments. It just all sort of clicked. They had this idea that they wanted to do something like this, and I showed up and had thought about all this diversity-function stuff that I’d read in the literature, and it just sort of all came together in this really nice, very lucky way. Everything just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

“When I started work on the small island of Cousin in the Seychelles, I had to do some managing jobs. So there’s monitoring birds, turtles and so on, but I was really into scientific research. But then at the time I was employed by the BirdLife International organization. I had to focus mostly on monitoring and guiding around tourists on Cousin, a tropical paradise, but was allowed to spend some time on research. So I had to do tourists and management work and all this monitoring. I was allowed to do one third of my time research and I wanted to work on endemic land birds. And because there’s only three land bird species present on the small island where I lived, I had the option to choose between the Seychelles warbler or the Seychelles fody or the Seychelles sunbird. I found one article on the Seychelles fody and I thought, okay, I don’t want to do this because it has been studied. And then the previous warden – she had studied Seychelles sunbirds. And I did not want to do that, because that has been done. But I was not able to find a proper article on the Seychelles warbler. So I decided to study that bird, and also because the whole world population was at that time only present on one small island. I thought if you study the whole world population, and if you’re not good at statistics, you don’t need to do statistics because you are studying all the birds!”