“The conclusions are still totally right, but I don’t think you can universalize it easily to any other system.”

“The core conclusion, yes, in terms of, host-plant adaptation promotes the evolution of reproductive isolation, at least to some extent. And this gets to the answer to the previous question – having a little bit of reproductive isolation isn’t really going to make you a distinct species; you need a lot of reproductive isolation. And so there could be many other factors. And in fact, this was why the title to the paper was carefully chosen. Even back in my PhD years, Bernie and I were careful to not put the word ‘speciation’ in the title. Because it was not clear if this kind of beginning or onset of speciation would really lead to distinct species. And so, we left ‘speciation’ out of the title and used ‘reproductive isolation; instead. So I think, at that level, it still holds, that adaptation promotes reproductive isolation. But really how important that is for speciation is a bit unclear, and in fact, we even have a paper that’s been in review for a while now that argues that there may be really a lot of other factors that are involved to really get you distinct species. There may be genetic or geographic factors that are really important. So, the core conclusions hold, but there’s likely a lot more to speciation than just adapting gradually to different host plants.”

“The early 1990s pre-dated a lot of the more visible current mechanisms for a paper garnering attention (no social media, no Faculty of 1000, etc.) This is one of a handful of articles of the ones I’ve published where one or more mathematical ecologists whom I had not met expressed their admiration of the paper to me within the first few years after it was published.”

“The engineers had those devices, what do you call them...pagers, they had pagers. And the Ecotron would actually automatically buzz them if there was a problem. The three engineers would be on call, in rotation. When they were on call, they were not allowed to drink. And to tell a British person that he can’t go to the pub is pretty hard on him. If the pager went off in the middle of the night, because the machine was overheating or something, whoever was on call would have to come in to trouble shoot. Some of it they could try to control remotely, or sometimes I would get a call – we have an alarm going off in chamber 6, could you just go and take a look to see if it’s a false alarm? If I was there I would run up and check, but if nobody was there they would have to come all the way in, sometimes only to find out it was a false alarm. But it could be quite serious – if the machine started to overheat, all of a sudden, 100 days into a 200-day experiment, you could lose the whole thing, because heat could over-stress the plants, insects, worms, snails, and all the other organisms in the chambers.”

“The Evolutionary Biology department at Princeton was, and still is, an extremely friendly and supportive environment. I remember emailing the entire department to ask if anyone has any sort of CPU time. This is before the time of using supercomputers. I was just running this on laptops and desktops, and I was fortunate to get 10 or 12 people who wrote back to me and said, you are welcome to use my computer. I was running around to different buildings, putting my executables on as many machines I could get hold of, and then running around collecting the data as they would come in, to get enough computational power to do the required analysis.”

“The field of microbial sociality has developed significantly in the past few years. I like to think of that developing field as the natural extension of the fun side projects that I began long ago on social evolution among simple replicators.”

“The field site was one of the University of California’s reserves, and when I started my PhD, I visited a number of these reserves to look for field sites. When I got there, I observed interesting sedge islands that served as habitat for a number of other perennial, vegetatively reproducing plants in the river channel. I did not know what I would do with them, but the numerous replicate islands composed of easily manipulated plants seemed like a promising start. I sometimes hear that people like this study because of the excellent match of the sedge islands to the questions, but it took over 18 months of working in the habitat for this connection to cross my mind.”

“The first time we submitted it, we had the mitochondrial DNA sequence data, and the reviewers wanted us to add data from a nuclear gene – to substantiate the phylogenetic patterns. Now, this seems crazy in today’s day and age – because we’re sequencing whole genomes – but back then it was still the time where you wanted to have more than one gene to build your phylogeny. And so, what I tried to do in the lab was to get a nuclear gene working, basically, with PCR. But I’m not very good at lab work, so my reactions were failing. I had good DNA, I had the mitochondrial sequence, and I just needed to get some nuclear sequence data to revise the manuscript; I couldn’t do it. And Steve [Springer] was very good at lab work and molecular biology. Actually, I didn’t know about this. He just ran a PCR with my primers and did the reaction for me, one night, and when I came in the morning, there was a gel with all the bands showing that the reaction had worked. I had to do more samples after that, but in the beginning, we weren’t sure if the problem was me, or if the problem was the reagents or the primers or something else. But what Steve did was confirmed that really the problem was me!”

“The first version was rejected from Science because a reviewer said it contradicted basic tenets of limnology and therefore had to be wrong.”

“The general conclusion has turned out to be supported strongly, by massively more data and more cases. Plus, we have an enormous number of additional insights into the process of genome degradation in endosymbionts. Probably the biggest extension is the finding that these genomes are highly reduced in size and number of genes, due to mutations inactivating non-essential genes, which then are deleted over time. This was revealed for Buchnera in 2000, when the first endosymbiont genome sequence was published by Shuji Shigenobu and others in the Ishikawa lab in Japan. We now have many many more cases of this kind of genome reduction in endosymbionts from different bacterial phyla and from other microbial groups.”

“The group of us met weekly, we divvied up projects and we started figuring out how we go about doing this. How do we gather the data, how do we extract the data, how do we ask the questions in a quantitative way? This took a lot of collaborative work and a lot of thinking and creativity on everyone’s part. Everyone was very critical for the success of that project. And we worked on it for a long time. It took us about a year; we had a lot of frustration, a lot of humour. Some of the humour was when we could not figure out what people had done in their studies. You know, they didn’t report their data in a way we could use it and we said, “What we need to do is we need to commission the services of a statistical psychic to understand what was in these papers!" We just had a lot of fun with it, we worked very hard, and we finally put this big paper together. One of the ideas that I had was: if meta-analysis was going to be introduced to ecology, it should be introduced in an important way – take a very important topic that a lot of people would be interested in, and something that would get a lot of attention, because otherwise people would ignore that this was something that was an important new tool that had broad applications. So that’s why we tackled such a big project. It was really very, very large and challenging to do that analysis. And of course, in those days, nothing was electronic. We were photocopying all the articles from, you know, from the print versions of the journals that we got at the university library and you know, doing things in a way that you wouldn’t do them now. And the statistics also is much more simplistic than what we would do nowadays.”

“The idea of doing experiments in the field with wild things was not a prominent way of doing biology in those days. In those days, you made observations, you wrote about your observations, you speculated about your observations and you went on. Today, we automatically think of doing experiments to tease apart what observations we have made, but back in the ‘60s that was not very common, especially in esoteric biological areas; obviously, in agriculture, experiments were the standard way of going at the world.”

“The idea that fragmentation can exacerbate threats to species is valid. The way in which the matrix may affect what happens inside a particular patch of habitat, or I should say, the impact of the surrounding matrix on what happens inside a forest or other ecosystem, is clearly critically important. But, you know, the really interesting thing is, three decades later, we’re still–and by ‘we’, I mean the scientific community in general – we’re still not sure of the degree to which all these different factors are contributing to the observed changes in songbird populations. So, the hundreds of studies that have been done since that paper of mine, most of which were vastly more sophisticated than mine, have made it clear that the question of, to what degree are songbirds declining and why are they declining, is a really difficult question to answer. I think the factors that I identified in my paper are valid in many cases. But I don’t think they’re valid in all cases. And even where it is valid, I couldn’t tell you, with certainty, how it compares to other possible threats. It’s a complicated story.”

“The idea was to put a layer of black carbon onto the paper, so that when the mouse ran through the tube it would pick up carbon on its feet and leave white footprints on the black paper. At the time I used a very unhealthy method in that I held the strips of paper over a benzene flame to make them black. We don’t use that method anymore. More recently, my students mix carbon black with oil and paint it onto a piece of waxed paper. They staple this paper onto a larger white paper strip so that the animals walk across the waxed paper and leave black footprints on the white paper”

“The interesting thing is that the story has certainly borne out, and now we can start to look at things in much more detail as to exactly how this convergence happens. What we’re doing now is looking at the convergence from a genomic perspective. [...] And so with the genomic data, what we would like to do is be able to get a feel for exactly how evolution has happened – what switches have gone on and off to get the repeated evolution of the same ecomorphs, and how they diverge, one from the other. Now, we can hopefully get at that with this genomic data.”

“The lab version of reality is highly abstracted and it cannot capture the range of interacting factors that you see in nature. People will say you do it in the lab because you can control it and be clear about what’s going on. That’s true, but if you want to know why animals or plants are the way they are in the real world, then you need to work in the real world, because the full scope of factors that interact in shaping evolution can’t be anticipated or replicated in the lab. I made a similar argument one time, way back when people asked me why I wasn’t doing these experiments in the lab. I said it’s because I want to know why things are the way they are in the real world, and I don’t have faith in the lab being able to reproduce that. The way this project has developed has shown that there’s no way that any lab work could have led me to an understanding of ongoing interactions between ecology and evolution. You just can’t capture that in the lab. I couldn’t have anticipated that when designing the lab study. Therefore, I think it’s important to work in nature whenever you can.”

“The lab was actually part of my room. I had brought everything I would need: hot plate, beakers, small spectrophotometer, mortar and pestle, table-top centrifuge. When I worked with acetone, I improvised a hood: I would balance the hotplate on the toilet and put a fan in the window. It was not wildly effective at eliminating fumes, but kept one alert to make sure the hotplate did not plunge into the lidless toilet.”

“The laboratory also provided accommodation and was located in the small hamlet of Resolute Bay. From that logistical base, our food web sampling was done from small powerboats locally and a larger research vessel the “Ogak” which is Inuit for “Arctic Cod”. Those sampling trips could be days to weeks. The seabird work was conducted primarily from remote field camps, from tents, and could last for weeks to months. Transport to those camps was by helicopter or Twin Otter. So, much of the work was logistically very challenging and involved lots of concerns about weather and polar bears!”

“The main conclusion of scale-dependence in productivity-diversity (and many other relationships) certainly holds true. However, the answer isn’t as simple as we suggested - naturally. First, there are good reasons we found what we found, but there are also good reasons different patterns could emerge. For example, local patterns aren’t always (or even usually) hump-shaped. And there are so many different ways to measure beta-diversity and productivity, that people have found lots of different results. But in all, I think the idea that scale is critical for understanding diversity relationships is pretty well ensconced.”

“The main thing would be that now the methodology for doing computer analyses in general and comparative work in particular is so much more sophisticated than it was.”