“In those days, I did not have access of the wonderful graphics programs available today. So, the graphics are crude by today’s standards. However, I prepared all figures with assistance from a Departmental graphics person (those positions likely do not exist anymore or are rare).”

“In those days, in IISc [Indian Institute of Science], if you wanted new journals, there was this little magazine, Current Contents, which came out with an abstract of journal content in different areas every week. You’d get it on Wednesdays into the IISc library. I would go there and write down the addresses of authors whose papers I was interested in, and come back to CES. Madhav [Gadgil] had a stock of postcards. We would fill out postcards with little reprint requests for authors, and mail it off into the deep blue sea. Three months, sometimes six months, sometimes a year and a half later, you’d get a response. I’d say about 40% of the people would be kind enough to send us reprints; 60% just disappeared. I mean, I don’t know where they went.”

“In those days, it was a bit hard to know, because we didn’t have “impact factors” or twitter or other kinds of social media. In fact, we barely had email! So, I don’t really know that much about how it was received, except that I have been surprised over the years by how often it is cited”

“In those days, search engines were not very good. So finding it [the paper] was not a trivial thing for somebody. And if you didn’t know it existed, you wouldn’t have found it.”

“Indeed, he and I co-authored several papers together. But he didn’t impose his name on all the papers. In fact, at least some of the papers that I gave to him, as a manuscript to read, had his name on the author list. He would sometimes cross his name off. I think that was an amazing gift, but also a way of training to do some projects together and some projects independently. The last thing I’ll say about this is in relation to graduate students of my own. Here at Cornell University, most of my graduate students – not all of them – have had a paper or two that don’t have me as a co-author, and those are projects that were largely done independently. So I try to use the same thing that Rick taught me – to do some projects together, but not to necessarily put my name on all papers coming out of the lab.”

“Initially, I planned to find a field site in Uganda, but Brit colleagues warned me about Idi Amin and the turmoil there. So I reoriented to Kenya.”

“Initially, it was rejected by The American Naturalist because the Subject Editor felt it was – are you ready for this? – “too novel”! Too heretical, too disturbing somehow. And I thought, well, that’s a really great compliment, but I don’t think they should reject it for that reason. So I actually wrote to the editor, Mark Rausher, and complained. Fortunately, Mark re-assigned it to a different subject editor and it eventually got accepted.”

“it [paper's conclusion] doesn’t only hold true; it has become, let’s say, a common sense. At that time we wrote that this maybe a unique rapid micro-evolutionary process that we have observed. Since then we have come to learn from many other papers, many other plants and animals, that this is not an exception. This is normal. But it was absolutely overlooked before we did this experiment. You may have heard about Peter and Rosemary Grant from America, from the Princeton University. They have worked for decades on the Galapagos Islands. They were astonished when, once, after a big drought, a specific population of ground finches went almost extinct, but after a while started to not only survive but also to increase the population again. This was due to the fact that they had developed, in a very short time, extremely strong beaks with which they could open the only seeds that could be harvested in the extreme drought. And when the normal climatic conditions came back to the Galapagos the size of the bill was again reduced to normal size. All this happened within about 10 generations. We have so many more examples – e.g. snakes that lay one more egg in a clutch and so on. And all this can happen within a few generations, in about 10 years or so. So this is now a general biological aspect. Therefore, I would say, the paper opened an area of understanding of how rapid and effective evolution can work everywhere in the world.”

“It [PhD supervisor not being an author] was more common then than it is now, but I think it also varies between disciplines and between advisors, and also between countries. I do remember asking Monty Slatkin if he would be coauthor. He gave me a tremendous amount of help, obviously, on my first theoretical paper. But he said, no, this was your idea, and you did most of the work, and you should take the credit. He has had a very enlightened, very generous attitude for his entire career with all of his students. I know that in some fields, and in some countries, it’s actually a sign of disrespect of the advisor if he or she does not want to be associated with the paper. It’s considered an insult to the student – the advisor is effectively saying that I’m washing my hands of this work. That was certainly not my case. Monty’s attitude was, if you come up with the idea and you do most of the work, then it’s yours.”

“It attracted a lot of attention and I was very lucky to have people like Endel Tulving supporting me. A lot of people in human memory research probably wouldn’t have looked at my research on birds. It wasn’t be a species of bird that most people in this field hadn’t even heard of at that time. But Endel Tulving told everyone about it. So it immediately got the attention of other influential people in the human memory work, who have become good friends and colleagues since.”

“It is certainly one of the most important in the sense of its impact on the field and in clarifying, to myself, my thinking about Community Ecology. It has been gratifying to the extent that Community Ecology has encompassed the points of view expressed in the paper, although I believe this would have happened in any event. Thus, the paper was perhaps more a chronicle of changes ongoing in Community Ecology at the time.”

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

“It took a long time to get accepted. It was rejected by Evolution the first time we sent it in, for not a very good reason. And so, we just wrote a letter back saying the reviewer is wrong because of this, this and this. And it was accepted!”

“It took us some time [to decide to submit the paper to PNAS]. The first draft was sent to Nature in 2002 and come back rejected shortly after that. In August that year, we submitted it to Science. It went out for peer review, but ended up rejected again.”

“It was a daunting task to work with so many fishes as things stood. More recently, my lab employs stable isotope methods to study food web ecology, which is much faster and easier than dissecting thousands of fish specimens and examining fragments of food items under a microscope.”

“It was a deep hunter-gatherer thrill to get up early in the morning, drive and hike to some of the relatively wild natural habitats on the fringes of the southern Bay Area, and explore them looking for butterflies. Bracing myself to ask landowners permission to work on their land was also a memorably scary but usually positive experience. We marked butterflies with Sharpie pen stripes on their wings.”

“it was a different era back then, especially at Princeton. At that time, it was not customary to put the dissertation advisor on the thesis unless the dissertation advisor had been quite extensively involved in the design and execution of the project. John [Terborgh] strongly encouraged his graduate students to design and implement their own research plans. That was the reason. It certainly reflected no disagreement between John and me or anything like that. Today, professors tend to be coauthors of the work done by their graduate students.”

“It was a long experiment and it was intense every day. We met weekly, and we would write out all the duties we had to do in a very regular fashion on the wall. We were collecting soil, arthropod and vegetation data, and monitoring all those environmental parameters. We really couldn’t go away anytime, because the machine was running all the time. Back then, I had never done growth chamber research. I was a field ecologist, so, to me, the idea that we would have this experiment upstairs, right there, running all the time, was strange. There was lot of maintenance too – the earthworms would all crawl out, so we had one person whose job, every morning, was to put all the earthworms back in. Or, the snails would leave the chamber, or get under the railings, and you had to find them all and put them back. Things like that. It was a lot of maintenance. But this was England, where people don’t work on the weekends and have a tea break in the morning and in the afternoon, no matter what. When I complained to John Lawton that the libraries weren’t open during the weekend – we didn’t have the internet back then – he said nobody stays here late at night, or comes in on weekends, except the crazy Americans! I was one of those crazy Americans.”

“It was a major logistical operation to do something like this. We had to be prepared with all the camping supplies, food supplies, field supplies, and scientific supplies that we needed. We had to make decisions beforehand on which sites to go to next, based on our guesses on when plants would be flowering at each site this year. We drove in multiple vehicles, with different subgroups sometimes going to different sites and then all of meeting up at a campsite in the evening. Sometimes we would get to a site, and immediately realize that we could not sample the site then, because the plants were not yet at the right stage for collection of floral capsules. We always had to have a contingency plan in place on where to go next if the site we initially planned to visit was not ready for collections. These sites were regions where we could call up someone and simply ask about the flowering state of plants. Once we were done working at a site all day, we would either return to last night’s campsite or find a new one. Everybody had a different job in setting up the camp – it was a semi-military-like operation. Some people would be responsible for setting up the tents, others setting up the kitchen and preparing dinner for that evening, and others for getting the samples ready for processing after dinner. We would do this day after day after day, and then eventually take everything back to the lab back in Pullman. There we would sort and store the samples, spend a day or two getting things done at home and organizing supplies, and then go back again into the field for another set of days. We did this week after week after week during field season, sometimes eventually losing track of what day of the week it is.”

“It was a paper that marked my transition from being an ecologist to being a conservation biologist. I might have called myself a conservation biologist when I wrote this paper, but only just. Soon thereafter, I would say – I’m a conservation biologist.”