“Sometimes, I am a little surprised about how well it was written, because in those days it was much harder. It was the dawn of email. Okay, we had the first versions of Microsoft Word, so it was starting to get easier. Today, in most countries of the world, scientists have all the papers at their fingertips, but in those days, I remember, it sometimes took several months for a paper to arrive at your desk, after you have ordered the paper in the library.”

“Statistics have just been completely revolutionized since that time. So, we would have much more sophisticated ways of analyzing those data now, through, linear mixed models and Bayesian types of approaches that would have many fewer restrictive assumptions than what we were using. So, in that sense, I think, we would analyze it in a different way. I mean, I think, fortunately, the results are straightforward enough that you probably would get the same answer no matter how you look at it.”

“Stephen Pratt is now a professor at Arizona State. I’d known Stephen for a long time; we were both together in Nigel Franks’s lab. He was a postdoc when I was a graduate student. And we both happened to be sharing an office in Princeton when I got the reviews for this paper. Steve provided lots of support and lots of ideas.”

“Sure, more or less, although it’s also really clear that parasites alone are not going - and we actually recognized this then too - that parasites alone are not ever going to explain all the variation you see in secondary sexual characteristics among species. The other major thing that’s happened since we did that work is a growing recognition that it’s not parasites per se, it’s the immune response and resistance to those pathogens, which are going to play a role in the evolution of secondary sexual characteristics. And I think that there’s been a lot of really interesting work on what’s now called eco-immunology.”

“Surely, it would never even be reviewed now because of its length. This is probably a good thing because it would be more readable, yet I have always enjoyed my “story telling” approach to ecology, that involves an understanding of the big picture in time and space. Even as a student I realized how important scaling time and space were, and that would be lost if the paper were to be chopped up as demanded by today’s standards.”

“Swallows are an interesting group because they’re cavity nesters, and so they tend to get a lot of parasites. But there’s “monomorphic bright”, “monomorphic dull” and “dimorphic bright” species just within swallows in North America. So you could look at purple martins, you could look at cliff swallows, and you could look at tree swallows. The problem is they all have the same breeding season, so you’d make yourself crazy trying to study them. I also spent a little bit of time trying to get ectoparasites off of swallows, based on this technique that I had heard about, where you stick the bird in a plastic bag that’s got an ether-soaked ball of cotton in the bottom and then wait for the parasites to fall off. And all that got me was a bird looking up at me like, “what are you doing?” It didn’t really pan out. Hamilton worked on insects, and I always liked insects and I thought okay, this is going to be better to do on insects.”

“Tatoosh Island, which is owned by the Makah Tribe, was Bob Paine’s primary study site, and he encouraged his students to explore possible projects there. It took no salesmanship on his part to convince me to work on Tatoosh. Because of the cool moist environment, the timing of low tide events relative to stressful air conditions, the high wave action, and the minimal direct human impact, the species diversity and abundance on Tatoosh is spectacular compared to other shores that I have visited. And the isolation of the island ensures that equipment and experiments are not disturbed by curious visitors, so it is an ideal site to do research. My first visit to the island in November 1984 is probably still the most memorable. I got to fly out by helicopter, and once there I was awed by all the eagles, peregrine falcons and marine mammals I saw, along with all the shore life. And the trip was punctuated by the appearance of a dead humpback whale on the beach, which had decayed enough internally that its bones were disgorged when the tide washed it back out to sea the next day. I had a cursory introduction to Simon’s Landing (our informal name of the site after a famous theoretical ecologist fell from the top of the overlooking cliff and nearly killed himself; I have not learned of any formal name of the site from the indegenous Makah Tribe who own the island) from afar on my first visits, but little work was being done there at the time, because of the difficult access down/up the cliff to get to it and the winter tidesare at night, so it was hard to see what was there. When taking classes at Friday Harbor Laboratories the following spring, I saw the broadcast of the shoreline episode of David Attenborough’s Living Planet series. Although there was no cable TV available and viewing the segment was like looking through a violent blizzard because of poor antenna reception, when the segment on rocky shorelines appeared I could make out this fantastic uniform sloping rock bench with strong patterns of zonation that the show was using as its representative rocky shore, and I said to myself “wow, that spot would be a really great study site!” That site turned out to be Simon’s Landing, and I turned out to be right. We typically visit Tatoosh, which is only accessable with permission of the Makah Tribe, for 4-5 days every 2 weeks between April and September. For most trips, we land through the surf in a small zodiac boat, and live out of two small buildings that lack running water and have minimal power provided by a solar panel. Summer tides are in the early morning, so we wake up around 5 am, work until around noon, then do research and camp maintenance (clearing trails, preparing equipment, transcribing data, read literature, review manuscripts, etc.) for the rest of the day, all the while keeping our eyes and ears open for interesting birds and other aspects of nature.”

“That [preparing a figure] was done pretty much by hand with rub-on letters. That was the pathetic way we did things back then.”

“That first summer, we rented two rooms in the home of a local school master who together with his family became good friends. I still correspond with his daughter. Ideally, I would wake up before dawn, walk to the sleeping trees where I had left monkeys the evening before, and follow them on and off until evening.”

“That first year I stayed at the ecological reserve where Cris [Sandoval] was working. She hosted me, and gave me a bit of lab space. In fact, I also had lab space from her former PhD supervisor, whose name is John Endler. He was a professor in Santa Barbara. John gave me a bit of space in the back of the lab where I could have the insects and run my mating trials and do this kind of thing.”

“That was the end of the endeavor. By that time, electrophoretic data was outmoded, and people were beginning to sequence DNA. I knew that if we were going to go on with this, we were going to have to use DNA-based methods of calculating relatedness and genetic distance. I was doing other things at the time, so I just wasn’t interested. And I knew that other people would take up the work, because it’s an interesting problem. Sure enough, people have. I’ll be leaving it to them to continue working.”

“The [...] paper also revised the global estimates of insect diversity [...]. In the first version of the paper (submitted to Nature), we only said that our host specificity results will lead to new, greatly revised, estimates of global diversity, but did not actually perform the calculation. Both reviewers and the editor suggested that we expand this section and revise the global diversity estimates ourselves, which we finally did. So that part of the paper was not foreseen when we were doing the field research.”

“The Nature paper got a lot of attention because it was the first paper to demonstrate inequity in a non-human species, but it actually proposed more questions than it answered: Why are they doing this? What is the underlying mechanism? Does this response occur across species? What happens if they get more than their partner instead of less than their partner? What is the relative impact of social inequity versus contrast effects? I’ve spent the better part of the last 15 years following up on these questions.”

“The Angelo Reserve was a Nature Conservancy site when I first worked there. I was very happy in Panama where you get deep in the forest and only occasional hunters or GIs practicing for Vietnam will come by, but my experiments were left alone. When I worked in the Midwestern Ozarks, sometimes you had to ask permission of somebody who was staring down a rifle sight at your partner down in the river, but after you talked to those folks you can work, and the experiments weren’t sabotaged. But in California with so many “wreckreationalists” [...] that wasn’t the case, and I spent three years trying to set up small, simple unobtrusive manipulations. For example, I’d put little photosynthesis chambers in National Forest lands, but the guys in their all-terrain vehicles get as deep or deeper into the forest, so my little chambers were always smashed up. Bill Trush, when he was a forestry student at Berkeley, told me about this Nature Conservancy preserve around the upper South Fork Eel River. It was 3.5 hours north of Berkeley, and it had a fence across the one road that went into 8000 acres of forest that protected five kms of river.”

“The applicability of the nearly neutral theory has expanded. For a long time, there have been arguments for the importance of gene regulation for morphological evolution than genes themselves. But only recently are the molecular mechanisms on gene regulation being clarified. It is now found that numerous complex molecular systems are involved. It is amazing that these systems are well organized and work to provide homeostasis as a whole. The proteins or RNAs of the systems are evolving under weak selection, and the nearly neutral theory is applicable. I have written about these subsequent developments in 2002 and again in 2011.”

“The Arctic can be an unforgiving place. Keith’s supervisor, Malcolm Ramsay, died tragically in a helicopter crash, along with another close friend and colleague. Subsequently, Marty Bergmann, who learned his stuff as my graduate student, died in another plane crash in Resolute, after becoming head of the Polar Continental Shelf Program (PCSP) that supports Arctic research. Once, Keith [Hobson], I and two others were returning in a seven meter boat, from Devon Island about sixty miles away, when the fog rolled in. We navigated through the ice as best we could and finally, just about out of gas, we drove up onto the sea ice to spend the night, without a clue as to where we were. But the fog lifted several meters and I recognized an island where I’d built an iglu, and we made it home on fumes that evening. It was routine, but it made a big impression on Keith.”

“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 big difference might be that, today, one would expect larger sample sizes, because the technology used to analyse samples isotopically has changed so much. Samples had to be prepared and run individually (by me) in the early days. Today, the systems are automated and students would simply submit their samples to a lab and sample throughput would be comparatively fast and less expensive.”

“The big thing is that it’s a lot longer than most papers that I write today. But that’s less me than how the field has changed. There’s very little place for this kind of paper anymore. When I was a graduate student, Ecology was the premier journal in the field, as, I think, for the most part, it still is, although there are a lot more journals now, and some of the others have come in to prominence. But at that time, Ecology papers were very detailed, had a fair amount of natural history, and they were really meaty papers. In some ways, I feel that it was a kinder and gentler time, so to speak, in that you had more time to read in those days. I’d be interested to hear your take on this, actually, but I feel that it’s much more of a mash up society today – and this is true of me as it is, I think, of students – we have everything at our fingertips, everything is hyperlinked, it’s very rare to sit down and remove all distractions and actually read through a paper carefully and have a chance to think about it. I think it’s fair to say that’s the way we used to do it. When I was a student, you would sit in the library or sit at home with your journal or wherever, and read the thing, whereas now much of it as done online, you’re checking the abstract to see if it has something you need, you’re flashing through the figures. So, it was a different time. And I think the writing style, to some extent, reflects that. I’m not sure people read Ecological Monographs papers anymore. I don’t know. I think there’s been a big change in, you know, not just scientists or students, but in the population of the world, in general, in our attention span.”

“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.”