“And it didn’t have a smooth ride through the publication path. In fact, in my office in New Zealand, I still have all of the paperwork surrounding it in the folder. I wanted to make sure I don’t lose that. It was a bit of a roller coaster ride, with ups and definitely downs. I guess about the time that it was nearing completion, I talked about the work at a meeting [...] and there was a journalist in the audience from Science magazine, Virginia Morell. The talk itself had created a lot of buzz, and she came up to me and did an interview and published an article in Science on it. I thought this is great. Science should thus be the journal to whom we submit the paper. So, we submitted it to Science. Then Mike [Travisano] and I both went to the Gordon Research Conference in 1997. The paper went to Science before we traveled to the US. We hadn’t had a rejection. Maybe this was three weeks by the time we went to the US, so we thought it must have gone out to review. We came back and still no news and so we’re sure it must have gone to review. But no, it was rejected without sending it to review. It just took them two months. That was disappointing, of course. Given that it hadn’t been reviewed I probably didn’t change it much before submitting it again. The intention was to submit it to Nature, but I realized that maybe we were in breach of protocol here. It could have been perceived that we had solicited attention of our work by Science and that would be cause for Nature to decline to consider the paper. So I remember enquiring with Nature, and they said, no, it’s fine as long as you didn’t solicit attention. Virginia Morell wrote to Nature and confirmed we hadn’t solicited her article. Nature said that’s fine, we would never want to block scientific exchange. We submitted to Nature, it went out for review, and came back with one very strong positive review and a very negative review. The paper was rejected. The letter from Nature said something like, we feel that the negative comments from a significant expert in the field simply preclude publication. What I remember about this negative review was that it was super angry. It was, as far as I was concerned, a rather misguided review. The reviewer made a number of claims in the critique that were simply false. So I decided to respond to this, to appeal against the decision. I remember spending a long time, no doubt with Mike, going through and rebutting the negative comments. And then, I made a case for it to be sent to a third referee. Nature agreed. I remember coming into work one morning and there was a letter in an envelope from Nature with the news that the paper had been accepted. The third reviewer had received the previous reviews and our rebuttal. He had effectively critiqued the negative referee. I remember one case where the negative referee, in relation to the frequency dependent interactions, had said, the authors are patently wrong. I forget exactly why, but that was one of the things I completely objected to. The third reviewer wrote, it is the second reviewer that is patently wrong, and not the authors!”

“Anybody who sets up a microcosm or mesocosm experiment struggles with two things: one is this desire to mimic nature – in your chamber or in your bottle; to capture nature in miniature. But at the other end of that spectrum, you just want a biological analog to test an idea you have. If you think that biodiversity matters, for primary productivity or carbon sequestration, then you simply want to have biodiversity that varies from low to high, and not worry about species identities. Also, we needed to pick species that would survive in the Ecotron. In preparation for the experiment, for a couple of years, we tried out lots of candidate plants in a mock chamber, and picked the ones that survived best. But then you will always get the people who say – why did you put that species with that species when they don’t co-occur in nature? So we did the best we could, given these constraints. We chose what John Lawton used to call the “weedy meadow” as the model for our communities. Apart from plants, we also wanted other trophic levels, to simulate a real biological community – decomposers, herbivores, predators of the herbivores, and a below-ground community including Collembola and mites and earthworms. We also wanted soil bacteria, for which we took soil from the meadow, shook it up in water and then filtered the water, so that the bacteria could go through, but all the little insects and other invertebrates get removed. What we finally had was very simple – a patchwork community with all the ingredients. But it wasn’t nature in a bottle. Rather, it was all the processes of nature in a bottle. We had people coming to see the Ecotron all the time, and most of them were disappointed. [...] I think people expected to see some sort of miniature rainforest inside the Ecotron, with maybe parrots flying out! Once we had the local gardening club visit us, because John Lawton thought we should have good relations with our neighbours. I remember there was this group of gardening enthusiasts standing around, all eager to see what’s inside, and when I opened the door they were all shocked. One elderly gentleman looked at it and said: “That’s a gardener’s nightmare!” I will never forget that. What he saw were weedy plants and slugs and aphids and white flies; all these pests. To us, thinking abstractly, it had all the essential ingredients to of an ecological community, and was beautiful. [...] We also had to vary diversity within each of the trophic levels in different treatments. That presented a special challenge, because we had to be really careful about always going from low to medium to high diversity when working in the chambers. Because if you went from high to low, there was the risk of accidentally introducing a new species – some tiny aphid in your hair or on your clothes – into the low diversity treatments. So we wore these Hazmat suits and slippers whenever we were in the chambers. The other thing was we couldn’t open a chamber after three o clock in the afternoon because the sun had set in our artificial communities. And it was a real sunset – we actually shifted the red to far-red, and dimmed the lights to get the right balance to mimic a sunset. So, if we opened a chamber door after the sunset, all this light would come in, and there were a lot of plants that would respond to that, and it could alter their flowering and growth patterns. So, at three pm every day, the buzzers would go off, warning us that the sun was setting, and we would always be behind, so we would have to rush to complete whatever we were doing and get out. The other thing was the rain – again we had buzzers warning us that the rain was about to start, and we had to get ourselves and all our equipment out quickly before they got drenched!”

“Apart from saying that this question has been of interest for 22 years, there is not much reason to cite our 1994 paper. If you wanted to say that biodiversity effects consist of selection and complementarity you would probably go to Hector & Loreau, or something more recent. Because they are better examples. If you wanted to say biodiversity influences nitrogen cycling you would probably go to Tilman or Peter Reich, because they had much bigger experiments – hundreds of plots – and they were outdoors. So, our paper is mostly of historical interest.”

“Around this time, John Lawton – my post-doc. supervisor at Silwood Park – asked me to read his contribution to a symposium volume on the topic of whether biodiversity is important. And John was actually arguing that most species were redundant, and that if you lost them it probably doesn’t matter that much. And I read this and thought – I can’t believe people ask this question. My own feeling was – how could it not matter? I mean, if you lost biodiversity, surely an ecological system would just not work as well, right? And so there I was, with the Ecotron, and I suddenly thought – we could answer this question with the Ecotron.”

“As a means to contextualize where the field was, flip through Karban and Baldwin’s 1997 book. That was the state of the field then, and you can then see how and why this paper was an advance at that time. Another thing I would say is to read a couple of these newer papers in the last three or four years that have been on transgenerational induction, just to see how the field has changed. In a way, the original paper is very singular in its contribution. It is a proof of concept showing that this stuff can happen in these two groups of organisms. On the one hand, we’ve come a long way in terms of understanding the mechanisms. on the other hand, we haven’t come that far in terms of understanding how important these effects are for population dynamics and evolution.”

“As an undergraduate, I had spent a month in the Amazon, right near where I ended up working, and that really inspired me to think about the diversity in those forests and to try to make sense of the hyperdiversity that is found in places like the Ecuadorian Amazon.”

“As I completed my PhD work, I became increasingly interested in fieldwork and functional explanations of behavior that put me on a track to evolutionary biology. When I interviewed for an assistant professorship at the University of California at Santa Cruz, I was asked if I would be interested in studying the seal colony at Año Nuevo, about 30 km up the coast. I answered yes, knowing next to nothing about seals. When I visited the colony in December 1967, I was captivated. I asked questions that could not be answered. Males were fighting in the middle of a large group of females. It seemed like a dominance hierarchy as had been observed and reported in barnyard chickens. But dominance hierarchies were not considered important at the time because most studies were in the laboratory and males were forced to fight to produce a winner. The hierarchy was contrived. But it was obvious on first sight that the male elephant seals I observed exhibited something like a dominance hierarchy. But one had to mark the males to really tell what was going on. I immediately wrote a research proposal on male-male competition. It was funded and I started doing fieldwork on elephant seals. This was the beginning of a long-term project that lasted 40 years (it is still going under the direction of others; I am retired).”

“As I said earlier, some of the people in the broader community liked those ideas, and got very interested in those ideas, and some people were getting the opposite results. That led to quite a series of debates with these other research groups. The interesting thing came about six years after we published the paper. A research group from California – Michael Turelli, who’s a population geneticist, Richard Glor and Daniel Warren – first asked me and my colleagues for the data that had gone into the paper and did the same with one of the research labs that was getting the opposite results. And they pointed out – it’s almost a bit embarrassing – but they pointed out that, let’s distill it down and simplify: these two groups were arguing, I see niche conservatism, and the other was saying, I never see niche conservatism, right. Well, it turns out, we were arguing about different points. It’s like my saying, the sky is blue, and you’re saying, no, the tree is green. This group took data from each of the two research groups and pointed out that the two research groups that were getting opposite conclusions were testing different null hypotheses. Basically, my group was testing the idea that niches were surprisingly similar between closely related species, and the other research group was testing the idea that niches were identical. But niches could be significantly non-identical but very similar. That then led to the question of which of those two things is more meaningful? And, you know, some of my colleagues might disagree, but I would argue pretty strenuously that surprising similarity is more important than being identical. And so I think, with those modifications, the ideas are still quite current and still supported quite well, with much better tools and much better insight and a much improved conceptual framework.”

“As I’ve begun to teach graduate students now, I notice something. When I began this project as a PhD student, everybody I knew, knew about Neutral Theory. It was front and centre to how most of the incoming students were thinking about communities, even if it wasn’t the focus of their work. It was certainly there as a thing to consider. I don’t necessarily see that when I teach graduate courses now. So, I think, in some ways, that this is a paper that’s a bit of that moment, especially in Tropical Ecology. I think the other thing that is important for readers to keep in mind is the inferences that we drew from the patterns. I think that the framework we used was much simpler than we now understand it to be. I think there’s more uncertainty today in linking the kinds of patterns that we see to particular ecological processes. That’s something that has emerged in the field, especially in the last seven or eight years.”

“At a conference, I met a professor from a Venezuelan university, Donald Taphorn, and he invited me to help me do research there. He was enormously supportive of my efforts.”

“At night I would fill in data sheets, which, back in Chicago, I would type onto cards that could be read by a mainframe computer.”

“At that point, I was actually just leaving for Costa Rica for several months. So I asked them, can I give this [revised manuscript] back to you in three months? At that time, in Costa Rica, I had no access to email for three months straight, so there was no way to resubmit it. They said yes.”

“At that stage the normal thing was to make them with a Rotring-ink drawing pen, ruler and a series of plastic stencils with letters and numbers that you could trace. And then that led subsequently to the use of sheets of transfer. So, you could buy sheets of transfers of either letters or numbers, and those started to look a bit smarter. But there’s no comparison with what one could do now. Now, it’s wonderful to be able to produce letters or figures or what have you by all the software packages that are available. I should say, when one was doing this, much of the analysis was done by hand as well. In the later stages of the work, we were doing all our statistical tests by computer. But quite a bit of this stage, when we were working in the early 70s, the tests were basically done with a calculator, manually. So, I was always very fond of using Siegel’s Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences, and that told you how to work out the specific tests – Spearman rank correlations, Mann Whitney test and so on. And we would do this by hand with a calculator.”

“At that time it was more common than it is now for research papers to be single-authored, and my advisor (Dr. Helmut Mueller) did not work on bumble bees and never visited my research site.”

“At that time we didn’t use the computer. Till today, I do all my writing, even of books, by first hand-writing, then by dictating and getting it typed into a computer. Still in the very old-fashioned way.”

“At the same time, in 1989, I was struggling. I had not gotten a federal research grant. I was an assistant professor and I’d published some things, but maybe not enough. And I was struggling and concerned about tenure. So, I applied for a fellowship, in part to stop the tenure clock. By having a fellowship and taking a leave of absence, I postponed the tenure clock for what amounted to a year.”

“At the time of the study, most researchers in Ecology had not yet fallen prey to that insane obsession with citations that now plagues the field, so we did not even consider that possibility of becoming highly cited.”

“At the time, [Botrylloides violaceus] was one of the most dominant invaders in the area. And it was one that seemed to escape predation by some of the natives, at an earlier stage than some of the natives did. I think that those were the reasons why we focused on that. It also happens to be bright orange, and it’s really easy to identify, and it doesn’t look like anything else in the area. It’s certainly visually arresting. It’s pretty obvious when it’s there. There’s no way to mistake it.”

“At the time, digital photography was brand new. We had one of the first digital SLR cameras, but it was in the lab. We didn’t take it out in the field. It was up on this tripod so that you could get a really precise photo of these things. It is really easy to do all that now, but, at the time, it was a little more challenging.”

“At the time, there were many fewer journals, and, after our first two rejections, Evolutionary Ecology was just about the only place we could have sent an evolutionary theory paper that did not use explicit population genetics and still have much hope that biologists might pay attention to it.”