“I think the story might not be that different [if I were to redo this study today], but today our lab has a UPLC Mass Spec and advances in Metabolomics which allow one to bring a much more detailed view of secondary metabolites.”

“I think the whole approach just doesn’t work. This is ironic, because I published a paper – might have been part of my thesis – in 1992 where we reconstructed the order in which ecomorphs evolved, using parsimony methods. It was a cool paper. It suggested that the anoles on two islands had evolved following the same pattern. But I now think the whole exercise is hopeless, because when you have a group in which homoplasy is rampant, any kind of confidence in inferred ancestral character states is very limited. To infer ancestral states, you need there to be a strong phylogenetic signal. The assumptions of these methods simply aren’t met when these traits evolve relatively rapidly. I just think there are some questions we can’t answer with phylogenetic methods. This is one of those cases.”

“I think there’s definitely been a shift in the field, but I don’t think it was sparked by my paper. Hubbell’s book on Neutral Theory was definitely the spark that got people thinking more about drift and speciation and dispersal, to some degree. And then, as the term meta-community became widespread, that was a major impetus to get people studying dispersal in more detail. So, I don’t think my paper was the reason behind that at all. I would actually go as far to say that my paper is almost like a response to that. So you have neutral theory pushing people over there, meta-community theory pushing people over there, classic niche theory pushing people over there, and it’s quite difficult for a student to see how all of those things relate to one another. My goal was to do that. To see how do those things all fit together. And in the end, they fit together via a common framework that really isn’t that complicated. It’s not as complicated as we’ve typically made it out to be.”

“I think they [main conclusions of this paper] completely stand. This is an interesting story, too. In 2012, we published a paper in Journal of Animal Ecology where we, essentially, repeated the same analysis for four populations, and also with more modern statistics. Our previous analysis was a bit inappropriately focused on using ANOVA approaches, but in 2012 we were using mixed models, for example. We were able to confirm our results – effects of learning, the seasonal effects and level of repeatability - through studies in other populations. We were comparing all these parameters across four different populations. One major problem in science is that studies are, often, not replicated. So, we don’t know whether a result is specific to the population studied, or to the species, or maybe even to the researcher who collected the data. This is why I’m pretty happy about this sort of confirmation, based on much more data from many different populations.”

“I think this is a strong finding. In fact, this morning I was thinking that we should go back and update the analyses, because it’s been over 30 years. But I do know that the main patterns are still there. In the paper, we talked about the possibility that some species would become more common because of changes in water temperature and others would become rarer; I’m pretty sure that’s what’s happened.”

“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 think we’ve identified what the key drivers are. You may be able to refine things now.You may come up with a slightly different age structure, you may come up with different climatic drivers and what have you. But I don’t think the logic of that paper changes. I don’t see any reason why anyone would necessarily go back and do the same thing over and over again.”

“I think what has happened in the last 15 years is that people talk quite a lot about genetic architecture of sexual traits [...] and the, kind of, sexual conflict that can come about from these situations. So maybe, these days, if I was working on this, if I got this idea now, I might phrase it a bit more genetically. I might also phrase it a bit more in the conflict between males and females kind of angle. But I don’t have any major regrets. It’s just, like every paper, a bit of a product of their time.”

“I think what I was starting to get at then was a bit more of a patch dynamic approach to Community Ecology, where you think about colonization and extinction, and how there is the interplay between these processes that determine the number of species you observe in a patch. Eventually, I was able to take those ideas and develop it into a more spatially explicit version of food web ecology. The original paper was published in 1998, just a couple of years before the millennium when there were a whole bunch of new ideas around Metacommunity Ecology. I think I still think about communities in terms of colonization and extinction, and how the environment and the traits of species affect these two processes.”

“I think you would have to read it in a historical context, in the context of what was known at that time, and what were we trying to answer, that may be well-established now but that was not established then. What were the controversies at that time, what were the things we were trying to resolve, what was what were we doing, that was different than what had been done before? So, I think to think about things from the perspective of where we were coming from at that time. And then, why did it become influential, how did it change the way people were thinking about the problems we addressed and the subsequent direction of science since then? That would be an interesting thing to think about. But it’s very difficult to go back and think about how people saw things at that time and just the whole context. There was no Web of Science, there was no online access to papers, there was no email, there was no web, we didn’t have cell phones either. It’s hard to put yourself in that frame of mind, you know, how you would be thinking about problems and how you would be addressing and approaching things, when so many things were really different, were profoundly different about the way we were doing science,and certainly the way we were trying to make sense of scientific publications. Most importantly, a lot of the people reading this today weren’t even alive then, so it’s very hard to imagine how the world was before you are in it.”

“I tried to discourage the lab techs from giving them [individual birds] names. They all had numbers on their leg bands. And that was the whole point, that all the people running the experiment needed to do was to start the computer, enter in the bird band number, check to make sure that was in fact the correct bird in the box and press the start button. Everything else the computer handled. But I know the people who fed and cared for the birds gave them names. People always name lab animals.”

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

“I visited there [National Museum in Ottawa] in 1988 to measure white-winged crossbills, which I was focusing on for fieldwork at the time. But after telling the curator at the museum –Earl Godfrey– about my ideas on the Newfoundland crossbill, which I had been thinking about that summer, he recommended that I look at the Red crossbills he collected in the Cypress Hills in the 1940s. They were large-billed and seemingly resident like in Newfoundland. So, I measured them without any idea that they might become important to me.”

“I wanted to work on feeding behavior in birds actually, and I was really interested in the work of one of my professors, Philip Ashmole, who is a bird behavioral ecologist. I signed up to work with Philip Ashmole, but then he offered a project of spiders and that’s how I started working on spiders.”

“I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and taking a seminar course with W. D. Hamilton, who was on the faculty there. And he was, and had been for some time, interested in the effect of parasites and pathogens on a whole range of things in host ecology, evolution and behaviour, and had already published, and was working, on the role of parasites in the evolution of sexual reproduction itself. Then, he was getting increasingly interested in whether parasites were also important drivers in sexual selection and mate choice and the evolution of secondary sexual characteristics, like the peacock’s tail. And for that he wanted to not just do modelling or theoretical work; he wanted to see if his idea would hold up in actual data. I was in the seminar and we were talking about it and he wanted to do a study looking at whether birds that had more ornaments were also more likely to be subject to parasites and pathogens. And I’ve been a birder for a long time and thought that sounded like an interesting idea. So we started working together on it. And then once we had the results, and they looked interesting and supportive of the hypothesis, we decided to make it into a paper. [...] I came in thinking I wanted to work with Dick Alexander who also was, you know, a well-known figure in social evolution and animal behaviour, and didn’t really know much about Hamilton at the time that I started graduate school. I just discovered that I was really interested in the work that he was doing and so I ended up working with him.”

“I was a postdoc with Russell Lande, the theoretician who put quantitative genetics into evolution. But in classic Lande style, he went off on a sabbatical, for a while, just when I arrived. So I ended up working with Mark Kirkpatrick, who was one of his disciples, and learnt a lot of the theory. Actually, I learnt a lot of the theory from both Russ and Mark. At that stage, Mark had been already collaborating with Steve on how sexual selection in monogamous birds might work. That’s the history of it.”

“I was a very young and naive grad student when I sent that paper off to Nature . I just wrote it up and put it in the mail. (Yes, you still actually photocopied and mailed manuscripts in the early 1990s.) I don’t know what the rate of rejection without review was in 1990 (it is about 60% now), but my manuscript received a full review. In the decision letter, the editor, Rory Howlett, used the word “reject”, and I thought my paper was rejected. About a week after I got my decision letter from Nature and when I was getting ready to start to rework it for a new journal, I mentioned to my grad student friend and colleague, Michael Nachman (now director of MVZ [Museum of Vertebrate Zoology] at Berkeley), that I had had a paper rejected by Nature. He had never seen a decision letter from Nature and asked if he could see it. I’ll never forget his face as he read the letter. He looked up from the letter and said “Geoff, this is not a rejection letter. This is a tentative acceptance letter. They want you to revise the paper and resubmit!”. I was completely clueless. I had seen the word “reject” and assumed Nature didn’t want it. Thank goodness Michael was there to coach me. So I revised the paper, wrote a response to the reviewer’s critiques, and the next letter I got was “you will receive proofs in a month”.”

“I was a very young and naive grad student when I sent that paper off to Nature. I just wrote it up and put it in the mail. (Yes, you still actually photocopied and mailed manuscripts in the early 1990s).”

“I was already down there watching the vampire bats long before that paper came out. But once it came out it actually gave me the idea for using the censusing as a way to measure the opportunity for the bats to share food with each other. That came directly from Axelrod & Hamilton. They have this little variable called ‘w’ which is sort of the likelihood that a particular pair will find the same circumstance in the future. Sort of the opportunity for future reciprocation. Earlier, I had some other method I had come up with to contrast kin selection and reciprocity, but when I read their paper it was like – Aha! I could just use my census data to calculate association. It was fortuitous because I did not have a specific plan for the census data at the beginning, except that it seemed like a good way to quantify social organization.”

“I was also sole author on my PhD papers, except for some I did together with a fellow student who was a theoretician. In those days supervisors didn’t put their names on student papers, and throughout my career I have also never put my name on students’ papers. I know the tradition has now changed.”