“They’d given us some instructions about length of the manuscript, which I had sort of ignored: my manuscript was about 90 pages long! So when they got it, they said, “Gee, this is really good stuff, but we just don’t have room for it. This would be, you know, a third of the book.” They opined I should not have trouble finding some other place to publish it. So I went off to Ecological Monographs and got very good service from Nelson Hairston Sr. who was the editor of Ecological Monographs at that time. And he basically accepted it within two months with no changes. It’s just one of these accidents of fate. If they had published it in the book, I’m sure it would have gotten much less attention than it did by coming out in Ecological Monographs. So that was a case where being rejected had a very positive outcome.”

“This came about completely by chance. I had just finished my PhD, a study of the behaviour of a little bird, the pied wagtail. My pied wagtails defended territories along a river, and I noticed that every so often, a territory owner would leave his territory to feed elsewhere, particularly on days when there wasn’t much food on the territory. But periodically throughout the day, he would keep coming back to check if there was anyone intruding on his territory, and if there was, he would chase them off. I was very interested to know why he was doing this. I wondered if he was trying to prevent any newcomer spending sufficient time on the territory that it would get to learn its characteristics and, in effect, think this is a jolly nice place to live. If the owner came back periodically and chased off a newcomer before it had time to learn about the territory, it would be easier to get rid of him. To test this idea, I wanted to catch the owner and keep him away for a sufficient length of time for a newcomer to learn the characteristics of the territory, then put the original owner back and ask if he would then find it harder to win back the territory. I tried for a winter and failed completely simply because the birds were too hard to catch. I was then living in a little chalet in Wytham Woods, on the edge of Oxford, where David Lack started his famous studies of the great tit. I had a spare summer because I had just finished my thesis and my next job didn’t start till the autumn. This was 1976, so 40 years ago, and it was romantic living up in the woods. Every day was sunny which was highly unusual for England. People still remember that glorious summer. I think we had a three month spell with cloudless skies and the wood was full of butterflies. And I just noticed some butterflies doing little spiral flights in sunny patches, and I thought, well, that looks like territory defence. Maybe I can do the experiments on them instead of the wagtails because butterflies would be much easier to catch. [...] The whole thing came through natural history curiosity and serendipity, I guess.”

“This is a paper I cared about very much and for which we sought feedback. Several colleagues read the manuscript and provided important advice. Mainly, people I was acquainted with during my Californian days. I had only recently realized how critical writing properly was and how much I needed to improve. Many of the colleagues cited in the acknowledgments are really master writers and helped very much in those years to improve my writing skills.”

“This paper was indeed my PhD thesis. It was my first attempt to do experiments. I had become interested in using lower organisms to attack problems of development and by sheer luck ran across Kenneth Raper’s PhD thesis and decided cellular slime molds were ideal, and they ended up a lifetime pursuit.”

“This site was, literally, about 100 meters [away]. The marine station is right on the ocean, and the field site where we did this was right in front of the marine lab. It was very convenient. It was the sort of experiment that required intensive monitoring. It would have been very difficult to do if it were at some sort of remote field site, unless you went and camped there, right. But for a lot of the assembly and a lot of the figuring out some of the spawning we needed microscope access and those sorts of things. So, it would have been challenging to do at a remote field location.”

“This was all before the internet, and things moved very slowly. It took nine months for the paper to be reviewed.”

“This was an area in southern Britain, and we had two reasons to trap here. First, this was an area which had one of the highest densities of wintering birds from continental Europe. And second, this is an area with a lot of traps in the dunes, where it’s easy to post mist nets and drive the birds. The British people are very critical about mist-netting, and don’t allow it in their house gardens. In mid-England we have faced a lot of difficulties. But in these coastal areas it was very easy. So let’s say we had chosen the area for good practical reasons.”

“This was at the dawn of the phylogenetic comparative method era. We didn’t have any of the incredibly sophisticated and intensive computer programs that we have now. The methods we used were based on parsimony, primarily. If I recall correctly, a number of these reconstructions were done by hand. We did simulations, which were done in a very simple computer program, and then the reconstructions, I think, I did them by hand. Actually, I remember doing some of those as I was traveling in South Africa, doing some research on a very different lizard project. I remember being in my room at night, reconstructing ancestral character states, calculating it by hand.”

“This was before computers, so I wrote it up by hand and then typed up the MS for submission. I did all the analyses on a small hand calculator, a Hewlett Packard 67, which I actually still have.”

“This was in the very early days of Conservation Biology. For obvious reasons, a lot of people were interested in how long small populations would persist. It is a very straight forward management problem. If you have a tiger reserve that has only 4-5 tigers in it, how long will that population be expected to live? It obviously has something to do with the generation time of the animal — individual tigers live a long time. But even if you are measuring generation times, how many generations does a small population persist? I knew – because I had spent a lot of time when I was a teenager on some of these islands – that, off the coast of Britain and Ireland, were a large number of islands where birdwatchers visited very routinely in the spring. These birdwatchers not only kept lists of how many species they saw and how many species were breeding there, but they had done so for 30-40, in one case 50, continuous years. So, one could directly answer the question of how long these small populations lived.”

“This was not a question-driven or hypothesis-driven study. It was a retrospective study and very much based on, what I call, serendipitous events. Things that happened that we were perhaps lucky to see. [...] Another important message is that what one discovers about nature may not be at all what one was expecting to see and learn. And I don’t know how strongly that comes through, but you know it took us several years to open our minds to the possibility that these things were going on, even though the evidence was there earlier that there were major changes happening. My belief system about the way that system was put together, and the fact that I thought the sea otter population was at carrying capacity, really prevented me from seeing the truth till later. I don’t know if that comes through from the paper.”

“This was the first in a series of papers. If you’re interested in, let’s say, the speciation component, there are other papers to read. If you’re interested in co-evolutionary components, there are other papers that I would recommend to read. I wouldn’t hold this up as a model paper, but I think it does tell a story that has largely stood the test of time. I think it could have been said more succinctly, and I think there are other ways to have said it or just show it, but then some of those datasets were not available. I think there are probably stronger papers that have been published since for the different components, just because we had more time to reflect and gather more data to more convincingly test some of these ideas.”

“This was the time before they had all these rules about carrying endangered species across country lines. It was before they had all of these constraints, regulations and permit processes which interfered with research samples getting in and out. So, that’s the reason we were able to do it.”

“This will seem really old-fashioned! Maggie Norris was the secretary at the Edward Grey Institute. In those days there were professional typists, who would type up your manuscripts on paper, with a carbon copy underneath. The typed manuscript would get sent off to a journal by post and then you would wait for two or three months to hear whether it has been accepted or not. And all the figures were hand drawn, with Letraset spots for the data points on the graphs. Computers and the digital world had still not yet appeared.”

“This would have been in 1999. I do remember that I got an express mail, like a Federal Express envelope, from Science that had the reviews in it. And I remember when I saw that there was a Federal Express envelope from Science in my mailbox, I was like, oh, that’s gotta be good news. They wouldn’t send me a Federal Express letter just to tell me they’ve rejected my paper.”

“Tim [Clutton-Brock] and I worked closely, usually in the same room, and almost every day, including weekends and holiday, often from early morning to late evening. I performed the analyses and Tim did the writing, reading out loud as he progressed with me correcting. We were thought by one of his students to be arguing very loudly and that our relationship would not survive, but it was creative composition. I have never witnessed a closer collaboration.”

“Today if you publish a paper like this, you will have lots of people contacting you. In those days that was far from the case.”

“Two decades back, when our paper appeared, there was not anything like Facebook, Twitter, Google Scholar or any other of the current ways for quickly ascertaining whether some publication has had some short-term impact on the audience. It was not possible to know how the paper was received when it was published, or at least I couldn’t. In fact, in those times few of us cared about citations, and life was, in this respect, more enjoyable for researchers than it is now, when hectic immediacy tends to prevail over reflexive pondering.”

“Unless they were interested in the history of science, I would tell them to ignore the empirical sections and just read the concepts and discussion. So much has been done empirically that they would do better to read something more recent! However, the concepts should still provide a useful introduction to reviews of modern sperm competition theory. The first caveat I would add is to remind them that it was written almost 50 years ago. The second (given to me long ago by Philip Sheppard) is to get working fast, because they will have had all their best ideas by the time they are 35; after that they will spend their time refining them.”

“Viewed today, there are many caveats. For instance, there is no paternity determination, as DNA methods were not then available. And the adaptive reasons for female choice of males with long tail could not be studied in this brief experiment. But the successful experimental demonstration of female choice in the wild may have helped encourage subsequent better studies.”