“[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”

“[I sent it to Evolution] because it was about evolution! That’s all. You know, all this business today of trying to figure out what’s the best journal to put your paper in, that didn’t exist in the 60s.”

“[Robert] Lansman was a faculty member in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Georgia, which was housed in the same building as my Genetics Department. One day in about 1977, I went to Bob to ask whether I might work in his lab for a brief time to learn restriction enzyme digestion techniques. Restriction enzymes had just recently been discovered, and I thought they might offer a means by which to study regulatory genes (perhaps encoded by repetitive DNA) in the nuclear genome. Bob welcomed me into his lab, but emphasized that he had little or no experience with nuclear DNA, but instead was interested in the biochemistry and physiology of mitochondria. Soon we found ourselves doing restriction digests of mtDNA (for example, in mice and gophers that I had been studying). The results were so fascinating that I quickly jettisoned my idea of studying nuclear regulatory genes, and instead switched almost all of my attention to mtDNA.”

“[The figures were drawn] by hand! In those days we had sets of frames that we used to draw lines, curves and letters, but they were all carefully traced by hand.”

“[The figures were made] on one of the first Macs. I think this was made in a stats programme called Systat, which I don’t think a lot of people use today. The other thing with this data is that, I compiled all of it, from the literature and museums, and published it. At the same time, there was a huge project led by a person,who has unfortunately passed away, called Ted Parker, who was one of the best neotropical ornithologists. He had compiled a huge dataset on ecological attributes and geographical distributions of neotropical birds. So we joined forces and that way all my data went into his database and I could use the compiled thing. That was published in a book, along with a floppy disk with all the data, by Chicago Press.”

“[Today] we’d use better data and independent contrast analysis.”

“Nature only allowed a limited number of references. [...] I think it was 20 max.”

“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.”

“A favourite, yes; the favourite, no. I think my most important paper is one in 1972 with Robin Baker and Vic Smith on the evolution of anisogamy. I regard it as being more fundamental – it is still probably the best explanation of why there are two sexes. And I would see my 1979 sexual conflict paper (long delayed in press) as being at least as important. But neither of these attracts the citations of [this one]”

“A friend (Jerome Harding) and I decided to escape from the urban Chicago and made a trip around the tip of Lake Michigan to the Indiana Dunes one weekend morning. We were walking along the lakeshore, we noticed the abundance of insects among the debris above the water line. It suddenly occurred to me that we were looking at a Bumpus [1899]-like sampling situation. I quickly showed Jerome, a computer programmer, how to capture and save two samples of the most abundant insect, the pentatomid bug.”

“A friend of mine – Chris Dick – who is now at the University of Michigan, was once bitten by a Fer-de-lance, which is a serious venomous snake. And the next vehicle was coming only three days later. One of the Mateiros – that’s Portugese for forest men – walked 20-30 km, I think, out to the road, then hitched a ride to the nearest town, and called for help. But till help arrived, Chris was just lying in a hammock with his foot swelling continuously. A funny story here – another mateiro, who had been bitten previously by a Fer-de-lance, offered to spit in Chris’s mouth, because he believed that would cure him. Chris says that he refused, but as his foot kept swelling and swelling and there was no sign of help, he was beginning to consider letting him do it!”

“A number of the langur monkeys had distinctive traits (a bit of earlobe missing, or an odd tail) but others could be hard to identify. So I poured purple ink into a spray bottle and then sat quietly among the langurs, waiting for a chance to spray whoever I needed extra help identifying.”

“A typical day would start with preparing the food for the animals. Then I would check survival of the animals, transfer them to new jars, count the number of babies released since last check and feed all animals. This would take between 3 and 6 hours a day. The biggest work was to quantify parasite growth inside the host. The transmission stages of the parasite are tiny (about 2 microns in length) and one needs to take care not to overlook them. I spent many days on the microscope.”

“Actually, relatively shortly afterwards, in late 2007, graphics processing units – GPUs – became programmable. [...] implementing these models on GPUs just massively increases processing power available to us. So, instead of being able to simulate hundreds of individuals, we could simulate, literally, hundreds of thousands of them. We could also use this extra processing power, not just to look at the mechanism of interest, but also the evolution of these types of individual strategies. That was a very, very important development – the massive increase in computational power afforded by massive cheap parallel programming units. That really allowed up to explore and develop these ideas in powerful ways.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Al and Ray raced lizards on Ray’s racetrack and measured the thermal dependence of speed. The daily routine involved racing many lizards many times, extracting the fastest speed of each run. It was not very exciting, but the Talking Heads and the Rolling Stones eased the tedium.”

“All I was trying to say was, look, these are animals that you’re looking at - a female animal. And yeah, sure, she’s got to get enough to eat today. But she’s also got to look after babies. She can’t be too far away from them. She’s got to defend her territory. She’s got to worry about males who might kill the babies. All these different things they have to do at the same time. It is much, much more complicated. And that’s why the title became ‘Food is not enough’. I was struggling to find a good catchy title. I still don’t know that I like that title very much. In fact, that was suggested to me by Marcus Feldman, the editor of The American Naturalist at the time. We were like, Okay, sure, this is what we’re trying to say.”

“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.”