“There is a paper I wrote about the difficulty of publishing the original paper, which was written up in a book on Tropical Forest Ecology edited by Walt Carson and Stephen Schnitzer. And it talks about some of the ugliness, the hate mail, I got from reviewers. I have a file of it; it’s buried somewhere in a file cabinet. When I moved to California, I kept them all, because it was pretty amazing. Did you know that I’m the anti-Christ of Ecology? Things like that. I tried to publish the Neutral Theory idea everywhere. [...] The kind of sweet irony is that all of the journals that rejected the original paper, started publishing on Neutral Theory all at about the same time, you know, Nature, Science, PNAS, American Naturalist. They all did it.”

“There is much to update really. The most obvious update would be the much more comprehensive understanding that we have today on the role of predation in species coexistence. The paper had just a small section on this. In effect, it has been updated though in my essay on “Species Competition and Predation” in Robert Meyers’ Encyclopedia of Sustainability Science and Technology. Another big update would be more on the effects of spatial and temporal scale, especially spatial scale. Early in the paper, I make the statement, “Many models of species coexistence are thought of as models of coexistence in some defined local area. However, to make any sense, the area addressed must be large enough that population dynamics within the area are not too greatly affected by migration across its boundary (103). At some spatial scale, this condition will be achieved, but it may be much larger than is considered in most models and field studies.” This is actually a warning against the focus on the “local community” in empirical studies. At the time, I did not have much to say about how to get around that problem. But that has changed with the further development of Scale transition theory, which provides an adequate framework now for how to deal with multiple spatial and temporal scales including non-stationarity of the environment in space and time, which we need for addressing long-term climate change. Finally, an update would provide a better guide on how to use the various concepts empirically.”

“There is no way that that one would repeat today my 1985 paper precisely as I did not back then. You might monitor actual nests, preferably using cameras. And in places where you couldn’t find the bird nests, you would have to use vastly more realistic-looking nests and eggs. You would have to hide them better than I did. And you would, again, probably watch them with cameras. And you should do the whole project on a much larger scale than I did.”

“There is only one figure, and it is really pretty terrible. I used to generate all of my graphics using a statistics program called Statview on an early generation Macintosh computer. I would create graphical summaries of data in PICT format that I could then import into a draw program. I really miss those old stats and drawing programs.”

“There was a British Ecological Society (BES) meeting happening around that time, for which abstracts were due eight months in advance. We were only maybe halfway through the experiment, and John Lawton was already convinced that biodiversity wouldn’t matter that much. He said, as long as you had plants and herbivores, why would it really matter if you had two species or 16. But I was convinced of the opposite. I had no particularly empirical or theoretical basis for this – it was more a gut sense that diversity must matter. Anyway, by the time the abstract was due, nothing that had been measured was showing differences across treatments – nutrient loss, soil chemistry, growth rate, the total amount of standing biomass. So we sent in an abstract to BES which actually said that biodiversity didn’t matter! But at the meeting, which was 8 months later, when we had completed the experiments, I delivered a talk which said biodiversity did matter. Nobody seemed to notice that the title of the abstract was the other way around! The room was packed and it was the biggest lecture hall in the conference. I had never given a talk with so many people. Once, I gave a talk on the reproductive biology of a histophagus protozoan, and I think there were six people in the room. And they were all my friends! But at this talk I had to actually step over people to get to the podium. Everybody wanted to find out what we had found out in the Ecotron. Because it was controversial. It was a very expensive experiment, at a time when funding for research in England was pretty tight- right after Margaret Thatcher’s reign.”

“There was a time when most PhD papers were single-authored by the people doing the work. Currently, most PhD-related papers are not single-authored for two reasons. In general our work is much more collaborative, so there’s often the adviser, but also other people as co-authors. The science has changed; it’s much more interdisciplinary. Also, PhD theses currently maybe a little bit less independent from advisors that in the past.”

“There was already domesticated tobacco – Nicotiana tabacum – as well as another species, Nicotiana benthamiana, an Australian tobacco plant that was a model system in genetic transformation research. These species were, already, Molecular Biology Genetics model systems. Therefore, another wild tobacco model has the benefit of being able to use all the molecular and genetic tools that were already developed for the other two species. You could readily do molecular biology and genetics on that plant. But, it could have been any wild tobacco plant. It just turned out that the person who started that, my former advisor, Ian Baldwin, had worked with this plant for his PhD thesis. And he continued working on his PhD model system, and at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, had this opportunity to take a wild species and turn it into a molecular and ecological and even physiological model system.”

“There was also a butterfly ecologist at Davis – Arthur Shapiro - [who] was always generous, and would often come back from the field and give us butterflies for the colonies.”

“There was certainly no popular press interest in it. There was very little of that sort of stuff in those days. But I got a tremendous number of reprint requests, which, in those days, was the way you found out if people were interested in your work. You would get a postcard requesting a copy of the paper. Typically, in those days, you would get a few hundred reprints from the journal. I probably mailed out well over 500, because I remember I had to ask for them to be recopied. I ran out of the original reprints.”

“There was something I wanted to do, but didn’t do, that would have been a clincher. That was whole island experiments, in which we removed leaf-cutter ants from some, rodents from some, and both ants and rodents from others. And, of course, there would have been untreated controls. We were starting to implement these experiments at the end of the study, but then two things happened, both beyond our control. First, there was a 3-year drought that brought the water level in Lago Guri down 26 meters. Yes, that’s 26 meters. This exposed many sq.km. of lake bed and effectively connected all the experimental islands to each other and the mainland. The last year we were there – 2003 – we found 6 different predator species on islands where we had not previously seen any predators at all, over a 13-year time span. This was convincing evidence that, in fact, the islands were predator-free during the main period of our research. Second, Hugo Chavez came in as President of Venezuela in 1999 and was cracking down on foreigners, especially Americans. There was no way we could have continued the project under his government.”

“There were no phones and the personal computer hadn’t been invented, so it was quite isolating.”

“There were some rather personal, patronizing attacks as well, from some others, but my friends supported me through it. It was very hard for me, to tell you the truth. I’m not used to personal attacks, but Carsten Rahbek and Nick Gotelli were my steadfast supporters and co-authors, and we wrote two papers defending MDEs [Mid-Domain Effects], in Am Nat in 2004 and 2005. They still think MDE is worthwhile.”

“These days, we tend to have a lot more material in the supplementary material section. I don’t think we had any supplementary material; this is a very short paper. But these days, you’re expected to provide much more background support for your analyses and so on. That’s one big difference.”

“These were some of my happiest days as a biologist, mainly due to the wide-ranging discussions Nick and I had about biology as we sat for long hours in our deckchairs and counted provisioning rates at the warbler nests. I also spent a lot of time in a shed used by the ringers at Wicken Fen. This was less fun, but made more enjoyable by regular visits from Ralph, an old Fen man who kept geese and ducks in the neighbouring field and who always had a good story to tell (“Saw a baby mink today. Got it with my pitchfork”). The shed was also well-positioned for access to the ice-cream van. Mike Brooke is the Strickland Curator of Ornithology at the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology. He did the field experiments on cuckoos and reed warblers with Nick Davies in the 1980s that have now become classic papers in the field of co-evolution, setting the benchmark for quality in this research area and laying the foundations for all the cuckoo work done since. Mike helped out by finding nests and letting me sit in his freezing cold kitchen to measure nestling begging behaviour (The chicks were fine because we kept them in heated nests but I had to keep popping outside to warm up!).”

“These were very long and incredibly exciting days. It was more than 13 islands. The 13 were just the N-S transect, but I also measured an E-W transect and worked on many other islands away from both transects. Many of the rocky reefs and islands were very far away from my host institution, the Tanzania Fisheries Research Institute (TAFIRI) in Nyegezi. I had a 7m long fiberglass canoe with a 25HP outboard engine. Travel time to the islands ranged from under an hour to more than 4 hours (some were even further away and required overnight trips, but these were not part of the transects). We had to leave very early in the morning, usually between 4 and 6am, to have sufficient time for the fieldwork at the islands. You have to have the nets all set before 9am and take them in again before 12am. Around noon, the lake becomes very rough, such that it is impossible to drive a canoe around the rocks and take in nets. I stayed in a rental house in a village a few kilometres away from the institute. I rented a little car from a friend, a teacher at the nearby fisheries school (who later became the Director of Fisheries in Tanzania). I would get up around 4am (earlier for the very distant islands), drive a couple kilometres to pick up my field assistance from their home, then to the institute at the lake. We would load the boat with all the field equipment in pitch-dark night. Electricity got cut in the evening after 8pm and would not return until well into the morning. We filled our boat with boxes, with fishing nets, a large cooler box to keep fish, buckets, diving equipment, photographic equipment, spectrophotometer etc. The mornings on the lake were beautiful; usually the lake is very calm at that time of the day and the sunrise is spectacular. The lake is huge, larger than Switzerland, so it is like being on the ocean. We aimed at arriving at islands at 8am and the first job was to take spectrophotometric light measurements. It was important to take these measurements at the same time at all islands. I also wanted clear skies, to have similar sunlight conditions at each island. I had built a large wooden box with polysterol filling and a bright red plastic foil around it to hold my laptop and the spectrometer. I had a 10m long optical fibre cable. This was usually lying on the floor of the boat. It had a heavy industrial coating, but I still managed to break it once! Measuring took some 30 minutes if everything went well, but the software was quite unstable and I often had to reboot and repeat (actually the software to make the spectrophotometer communicate with the laptop was so difficult that I was about to fail getting it to work at all, was it not for the help of my friend Laurent Assembe, a grad student in electro engineering, who managed to get it all working the night before I flew to Tanzania). After measuring the aquatic light spectra, we would set nets. I would record the water depth every few meters and make drawings in my field books showing net position. Then my field assistants would go fishing for inshore and crevice-dwelling cichlid species with hook and line and I would go scuba diving to do visual surveys and transect counts. Just before noon we would pull the nets. Often times I would inspect the nets while scuba diving, and remove the most precious fish already under water and take them up in plastic bags to have them show their best colours. In turbid water areas, this was impossible because there were crocodiles and you would not see much under water at all. On a typical day we would identify several hundred cichlids, record depth at capture for each, and take live colour photos of many. It is important to know that the rare species in these rich assemblages come as singletons among many hundred that you inspect. So you really cannot afford to lose a single fish in the documentation process if you want to measure species richness. This is something I have often seen people overlook, but it stuck with me through the rest of my career and influenced my work on fish assemblages elsewhere too. We would return to the station in the late afternoon. I would drive my assistants to their homes and then start opening the big ice box which contained the catch, all sorted into small bags by net and capture depths. Processing the fish included confirming identification-relevant traits under a microscope, taking some morphological distances, taking tissue samples for genetic work, and preserving the fish in formalin. I don’t think I ever finished before 10 or 11pm, with the last 3 hours under oil lamp or candle light. Anna [Samwel], my wife to come, assisted me every night. She also often did stomach content analyses of some of the fish (those whose feeding habits I did not know yet) the next day while I went back to the lake again. None of this would have been possible had I not had the support from three tireless field assistants, Mhoja Kayeba, Mohamed Haluna and Ruben Enoka, and my wife Anna.”

“They are on VHS tape which isn’t used anymore. We use different kind of recorders – DAT recorders – now. So we don’t have the right kind of playback machine [to play VHS tapes].”

“They (the phylogenies) originally were hand drawn, but I think I had, I believe, a graphic artist in our medical school redraw them.”

“They [PhD supervisors] didn’t want to be [authors] – times have changed. I started with Robin Foster who had a very hands-off approach. So, I felt the thesis I designed was very much my own. But he gave me the confidence that it was perfectly feasible to work in the tropics. So off I went. He left academics while I was in the field, and the newly hired Doug Schemske probably felt he had no choice but to take in this orphan, warts and all. We had overlapped some on BCI [Barro Colorado Island] and he commented on how hard I worked. Poor Doug took on the responsibility of reading my painful, weekly progress on writing up my thesis. Without him, I would never have turned it into something as professional or compelling. I am very grateful to both of them for their different, but extremely valuable gifts.”

“They were hand drawn, just on a sheet of paper.”

“They were the closest rocky intertidal zones to my base in Tucson, Arizona.”