“After senior high school, I entered Nagoya University, which was a prestigious university, the best one in Nagoya area. In the university, I tried to go to the medical school, because of better opportunity for getting a job, but failed the examination. So I moved to Tokyo University Agriculture department, where transfer from the other university was accepted because of not enough students. I majored in horticulture but I found studying it was not attractive. After graduation, I had difficulty in finding a job, and I worked for 2 years in a publishing company. Then I found a position in the Kihara Institute for Biological Research, which moved from Kyoto to Yokohama because Kihara retired from Kyoto University and moved to Yokohama. Dr. Hitoshi Kihara was the most famous geneticist in Japan at that time.”

“And it didn’t have a smooth ride through the publication path. In fact, in my office in New Zealand, I still have all of the paperwork surrounding it in the folder. I wanted to make sure I don’t lose that. It was a bit of a roller coaster ride, with ups and definitely downs. I guess about the time that it was nearing completion, I talked about the work at a meeting [...] and there was a journalist in the audience from Science magazine, Virginia Morell. The talk itself had created a lot of buzz, and she came up to me and did an interview and published an article in Science on it. I thought this is great. Science should thus be the journal to whom we submit the paper. So, we submitted it to Science. Then Mike [Travisano] and I both went to the Gordon Research Conference in 1997. The paper went to Science before we traveled to the US. We hadn’t had a rejection. Maybe this was three weeks by the time we went to the US, so we thought it must have gone out to review. We came back and still no news and so we’re sure it must have gone to review. But no, it was rejected without sending it to review. It just took them two months. That was disappointing, of course. Given that it hadn’t been reviewed I probably didn’t change it much before submitting it again. The intention was to submit it to Nature, but I realized that maybe we were in breach of protocol here. It could have been perceived that we had solicited attention of our work by Science and that would be cause for Nature to decline to consider the paper. So I remember enquiring with Nature, and they said, no, it’s fine as long as you didn’t solicit attention. Virginia Morell wrote to Nature and confirmed we hadn’t solicited her article. Nature said that’s fine, we would never want to block scientific exchange. We submitted to Nature, it went out for review, and came back with one very strong positive review and a very negative review. The paper was rejected. The letter from Nature said something like, we feel that the negative comments from a significant expert in the field simply preclude publication. What I remember about this negative review was that it was super angry. It was, as far as I was concerned, a rather misguided review. The reviewer made a number of claims in the critique that were simply false. So I decided to respond to this, to appeal against the decision. I remember spending a long time, no doubt with Mike, going through and rebutting the negative comments. And then, I made a case for it to be sent to a third referee. Nature agreed. I remember coming into work one morning and there was a letter in an envelope from Nature with the news that the paper had been accepted. The third reviewer had received the previous reviews and our rebuttal. He had effectively critiqued the negative referee. I remember one case where the negative referee, in relation to the frequency dependent interactions, had said, the authors are patently wrong. I forget exactly why, but that was one of the things I completely objected to. The third reviewer wrote, it is the second reviewer that is patently wrong, and not the authors!”

“At the same time, in 1989, I was struggling. I had not gotten a federal research grant. I was an assistant professor and I’d published some things, but maybe not enough. And I was struggling and concerned about tenure. So, I applied for a fellowship, in part to stop the tenure clock. By having a fellowship and taking a leave of absence, I postponed the tenure clock for what amounted to a year.”

“Basically, what you’re supposed to do is not only frame and pursue an original scientific study, but you’re supposed to get what are construed as positive results. And I was getting nothing but negatives. I remember my worst moment was, actually, with my wife, we were in Michigan, the state of Michigan, collecting fossils, Our clothes were dirty, so we went to a laundromat, washed our clothes, and I pulled a specimen out of my pocket – which was a particularly nice one and very hard, so I was just carrying it around – and I just couldn’t tell it from the ones in New York. And, you know, it turns out it wasn’t even the same species – you have to look at the eyes, so forth. But these things all basically look alike. You know, so here I am halfway across the United States, or a third of the way across the United States, in a different segment of time, but it’s just the same as what I was familiar with back in New York. And my heart sank, it really did. I thought I wouldn’t be able to get a PhD because I wasn’t seeing any evolution.”

“Devising a means to change the coloration of birds was one of the most challenging parts of my research. Making birds redder was not so hard. There were red art markers that would increase plumage redness. But I also wanted to decrease redness, which was not easy and for which there were no published methods. I tried calling experts in bird coloration around the country like Sievert Rohwer at the University of Washington and Ken Parkes at the University of Pittsburgh. All of the senior zoologists who I contacted encouraged me to do the experiments, but they had no useful advice to offer regarding how to lighten the red coloration of finches. I was starting to think that I would have to abandon the experiment or do it only by adding red to feathers when it suddenly occurred to me who I needed to consult: the real experts in manipulating the color of integument, beauticians. I looked in the phone book, found the address for a beauty supply shop, and drove over. It was both a salon and store, and those women really were experts on manipulating coloration. And when I explained my research project, they were extremely sharp and insightful consultants. In retrospect, I should have taken down their names and acknowledged them in the paper.”

“Early on, Peter Grant told me that we should write a short follow-up paper to make the methods more accessible to the average reader. Unfortunately, we did not take that advice and the paper is, today, still a very difficult read. [...] I often think that if we had followed Grant’s advice we might have saved hundreds of users from going astray.”

“Everything fell apart. I carefully followed the published instructions, but when I tried to stain VAM fungi in roots, I ended up with a bunch of disconnected xylem elements and cortical cells. When I tried to extract spores from the tailings – and looked at my spore extracts through the microscope – all I could see was a bunch of sand and random organic matter. It was a seriously low period of my master’s studies. In the early 80’s, nobody at UW-Madison studied mycorrhizae, and I had no idea what VAM fungi REALLY looked like! I suddenly realized how naïve I had been to think that I could simply read about mycorrhizal techniques in a book and then successfully measure them.”

“Frankly, it became overwhelming. This was just such a big effort, it became really overwhelming to do more with it. [...] I was also involved with a lot of other things going on at the same time. So some of that we never really looked at again, we never published it, which is kind of a shame because we went to a lot of work to collect that data.”

“Herb Bormann and I submitted a proposal to the National Institutes of Health, around the idea that we could use the chemistry of stream water much like a physician uses the chemistry of blood and urine to diagnose the health of the patient. We thought that was a reasonable metaphor. The reviewers didn’t like it at all and turned it down flat, so we revised and submitted to the National Science Foundation, and were funded for three years, at a very small amount of money, to start the project. That’s how it began.”

“I first submitted the paper to American Naturalist, with both the data and the food web model I was talking about above. The reviewers liked it ok, but felt that the model and data didn’t match very well, and so it was rejected. So, we chopped out the model and decided to go for Nature, where it was accepted (after revisions of course). We eventually published the model that went along with it in the Ecological Niches book.”

“I had created these little 2*2 meter cages in which we could put different insects or small mammals in. That experiment didn’t work very well because the small mammals didn’t cooperate. In some cages, they totally destroyed all the vegetation and in others they didn’t do anything except to sit in there and die.”

“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 we submitted it first, we got, sort of, a reject and resubmit, we went away and did a bit more work, and then it went back to review again. I think we got minor revisions. We may have even submitted it to Nature first – I can’t remember exactly – but they rejected it with some comments.”

“I struggled a lot in my first two years of graduate school on the particular questions to ask and the particular systems to study. I had many failed attempts.”

“I submitted it to Nature and it was rejected. I looked at the comments and realized that what I had done was not explain exactly what I was trying to do. The reviewers were very good reviewers, but I think what they expected was a paper that was a little bit more traditional. They expected me to ask how morphological or other traits vary among populations. But what I was trying to do here was something completely different, which was ask how ecological outcomes vary among populations. I didn’t articulate that as well in that original draft. I just made the assumption that they would get that point, and they ended up focusing on other points. So, I wrote the editor and said that I realized the fault was mine, but with just a small amount of rewriting, I think I could articulate the goal and novelty in a way the reviewers would understand. I asked him to let me do that and then have them take another look at the manuscript. If they still do not think it is acceptable, then the design is my fault. The editor, who was Rory Howlett, who was a remarkable editor for Nature, looked at my comments, looked back to the original manuscript and said, I see what you’ve done and what you mean. He sent it back to the reviewers and the reviewers said, ah, I see; now I get it. This is interesting. They re-reviewed the manuscript, I made some additional changes to incorporate their suggestions, and Rory Howlett then accepted it. I was grateful for the way in which the editor and the reviewers kept an open mind throughout the process.”

“I think the one part that I would have changed, that I was the most uncomfortable with, was the section on remixing and gene flow and maladaptation. I felt that that was a little too speculative. Subsequent work supports all the other parts quite well, but I probably shouldn’t have included that part. But it was my attempt to address all the components of the geographic mosaic. I cringed when I read it.”

“I think this was a big home run and I was lucky to have it early in my career; this is pre-tenure. But when I tell the story of the next year, I always make a little joke out of the fact that I’d gotten this really slam dunk result in ’89, wrote it up and it was published in ’90. In summer ’90, I repeated the experiment and it totally failed. As I tell this in talks, I watch the faces of students or young academics .. you know, first everybody’s horrified if we can’t repeat our results. But in ecology, context can change everything. And that’s a lesson I want to convey: if you can’t repeat your work, why not? Figuring that out will enlarge your understanding of nature.”

“I try, but of course fail, to write as simply and briefly as possible, without sacrificing clarity and readability.”

“I was not invited by the journal to write the paper. I submitted a proposal three times in successive years before it was accepted.”

“I wrote this paper in 1997 and then continued rewriting it and repeating the basic experiment for five years as the paper was repeatedly rejected by at least five journals. [...] I revised the paper many times as I attempted unsuccessfully to publish it.”