“What often comes to mind in this context is the impact this paper had, and it continues to be highly cited, despite some methodological flaws. It was published at about the same time as Hurlbert’s influential paper on pseudoreplication. Our work was a classic case of pseudoreplication – a pond divided in half with one treatment assigned to one half and another treatment to the other half. We think it is interesting for a student to consider what criteria they would use in taking lessons from studies that are flawed in some respect. How does one evaluate what is lasting and useful despite methodological flaws and why? We subsequently replicated such experiments across ponds, but it is daunting to imagine replicating this experiment given the amount of work that went into one divided pond. Scientific knowledge increases by incremental steps. This experiment was a first step in revealing the profound impact of non-lethal effects of predators on their prey. Thus, it was valuable despite its methodological flaws.”

“What’s interesting is that when I went to Panama these were not called Tungara frogs. They were called mud-puddle frogs. And then I asked a Panamanian if there is a Panamanian name for the frogs. He said ‘Tungara’. The word is onomatopoetic. Tungara sounds like a whine and two chucks – Tooon ga ra. Later, after I started to use that name, I found a field guide to the frogs of Nicaragua where the author independently was also calling this frog Tungara.”

“When applying to graduate school, I was fortunate enough to stumble across “that guy who did the starfish study”, Bob Paine at the University of Washington, and made it into his lab. Bob was a strong believer in students maintaining an independent intellectual identity as a way both to increase the marketability of his students upon graduation and to increase the intellectual and methodological breadth and perspective of his lab. Therefore, he actively discouraged students from working directly on any of his own projects and did not engage in slapping his name on his students’ papers, so he published very few papers with his students. I try to maintain this approach in my own lab, as Bob was remarkably successful at producing graduates who went on to faculty positions of their own.”

“When I arrived at my postdoc at the University of Connecticut, my postdoc advisor had been working on invasions, on these marine invertebrate communities that grow on piers and docks and whatnot. And they had a wonderful wealth of natural history information about all of these species, and they knew how to culture them and grow them in the field. They had just developed this movable tile apparatus, which was the technique that we ended up using to manipulate diversity in these experiments. It just all sort of clicked. They had this idea that they wanted to do something like this, and I showed up and had thought about all this diversity-function stuff that I’d read in the literature, and it just sort of all came together in this really nice, very lucky way. Everything just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

“When I complained to John Lawton that the libraries weren’t open during the weekend – we didn’t have the internet back then – he said nobody stays here late at night, or comes in on weekends, except the crazy Americans! I was one of those crazy Americans.”

“When I finished my PhD I had just spent 26 months of a five year period living largely by myself in the tropics, with not a lot of intellectual interaction. At that point, I decided that this was not a good strategy in the long-term. I didn’t want to be like a primatologist spending years on end studying one species. [...] At that time, I think I also felt that I had got, kind of, the most interesting story out of the vampire bat, given the technology at that time, and doing anything more would have been very hard. The next step required a captive colony, for which I didn’t have the resources then. [...] Then Jerry [Carter] approached me [...] about coming to do essentially a follow up of my PhD work. He really had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do. He had read my papers very thoroughly, knew exactly what I’d found and was aware of the debate over the merits. He loved the story and really wanted to confirm the story.”

“When I planned the experiments, rapidly hardening cyanoacrylate superglue was coming on the market. The brand I used was called “Hot Stuff”, from Satellite City Instant Glues. Testing with feathers from other birds, I found that the glue hardened quickly enough, in just a few seconds, to be suitable for use in the field for tail elongation.”

“When I planned the experiments, rapidly hardening cyanoacrylate superglue was coming on the market. The brand I used was called “Hot Stuff”, from Satellite City Instant Glues. Testing with feathers from other birds, I found that the glue hardened quickly enough, in just a few seconds, to be suitable for use in the field for tail elongation. I practiced and improved my skill at feather manipulation at the lab before going to Kenya for the study. During manipulations in the field, the assistant sat in front of me holding the bird, while I cut, trimmed and glued the tail feathers.”

“When I started getting interested in induced response to herbivory in wild radish, I came up with the idea about transgenerational effects, and it seemed like a bit of a fringe or crazy idea, so it was on the back-burner. What got us to do the experiments is pretty interesting. There’s two pieces of the story I suppose. One is that I had read an obscure paper in The New Zealand Journal of Agriculture that reported that oilseed rape plants, when damaged by aphids, produced more defensive glucosinolates in the seeds. And that was a problem (for human consumption) because glucosinolates in the oil being pressed from the seeds gave it a bad flavour. This gave me the idea that there might be some transfer of information from what the parent plant experiences to what goes into the seed, which henceforth might shape the seedlings’ defences. The other thing is that there was an undergraduate student who came along named Joel Kniskern who was interested in this just as an initial research project. When you have interested undergraduates around, it’s an opportunity to try out some of the more risky ideas, and I proposed to him several different projects. This was the one that he chose.”

“When I started work on the small island of Cousin in the Seychelles, I had to do some managing jobs. So there’s monitoring birds, turtles and so on, but I was really into scientific research. But then at the time I was employed by the BirdLife International organization. I had to focus mostly on monitoring and guiding around tourists on Cousin, a tropical paradise, but was allowed to spend some time on research. So I had to do tourists and management work and all this monitoring. I was allowed to do one third of my time research and I wanted to work on endemic land birds. And because there’s only three land bird species present on the small island where I lived, I had the option to choose between the Seychelles warbler or the Seychelles fody or the Seychelles sunbird. I found one article on the Seychelles fody and I thought, okay, I don’t want to do this because it has been studied. And then the previous warden – she had studied Seychelles sunbirds. And I did not want to do that, because that has been done. But I was not able to find a proper article on the Seychelles warbler. So I decided to study that bird, and also because the whole world population was at that time only present on one small island. I thought if you study the whole world population, and if you’re not good at statistics, you don’t need to do statistics because you are studying all the birds!”

“When I was a graduate student, papers in The American Naturalist were often revered. I mean, many of the synthetic papers in American Naturalist have had a major and lasting impact. And to me this was, of anything I’d ever written, a perfect fit for The American Naturalist. It combined ecology and evolution, and it was synthetic. And so, I submitted it first to The American Naturalist, and it was read by three editors, and they didn’t send it for review. They felt that it didn’t really say anything that they hadn’t already thought about. And so - I can only speculate - but it made me wonder if sometimes the real experts on a topic are necessarily the best to evaluate whether something synthetic is going to be useful. I don’t doubt that they had thought about things that way, but until somebody writes it down, in a way that that can be broadly diffused, then just because it’s in somebody’s mind, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be published. And so that was quite disappointing, I must say. And then I submitted a proposal to Ecology Letters; it must have been one of their Concepts & Syntheses papers. The proposal was accepted, which just means that they will allow you to submit a full manuscript, but then when I submitted the full manuscript - I can’t remember if I did a proposal or if I just went straight to the manuscript - either way, it was the same thing, where one, maybe a couple of editors, read it and they just didn’t think it was novel enough. Like the perspective wasn’t new; they’d also thought about things that way. The wording was very different, but the thrust of the rejections were more or less the same: these particular editors had already thought about things that way and so it didn’t strike them as pushing things forward enough, or novel enough. In going through old files while checking this transcript, I actually realized that a proposal to Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics was also rejected. It was a few pages, not a whole manuscript, and I don’t have any record of the rejection itself, just a memory. But I have the proposal itself and it was definitely submitted and rejected.”

“When I was an undergraduate student, I got the chance to go on an ornithological expedition to the Andes in Ecuador, the purpose of which was, basically, to do a survey of all the cloud forests. At that time, I became interested in questions that we now call Macroecology. I read a lot of the literature of people like John Terborgh and Jim Brown, and since we were working in mountains, I particularly read everything I could about mountains and diversity patterns. The literature was unanimous that it was a universal rule that species richness declined with altitude. So, with this background, we went on these expeditions. We basically spent 6 months in pouring rain in the cloud forest. It was fabulous; the diversity around us was just astonishing. When we were done with that – this was way back in the time of no emails – we posted a snail mail back to our supervisor in Copenhagen. We were four people in this expedition, and in our mail we said that since we had now worked six months, would it be okay if we stayed on and made a venture down in the Amazon. At that time, the Amazon was thought of as the richest place on earth and we really wanted to see it. We waited and a month later we got a reply saying – Yes, we could go down to the Amazon. We went down and I have never been so disappointed in my life! I expected to see so many more bird species than I saw in the cloud forest, but there were fewer. I was shocked because everything I read and all the textbooks told me that I should find more species in the lowland. So I started to think about what was wrong – Was it very unusual? Was it because we couldn’t find the species? – this was kind of simmering in my head while I was doing my Master’s degree on other things.”

“When I was in Tanzania for many months, we would set up telephone appointments every few weeks. There was no working internet in that part of Tanzania in those days and no mobile phone nets! To talk to Jacques or Frans on the phone I had to make an appointment ahead of time, and had to come to town to the house of someone who had a working telephone landline.”

“When I went to Stanford and gave my thesis defence, at the back of the room was an old man with his head down on the desk who seemed to be sleeping through the whole thing. We get to the end and he raises his hand and he says ‘Your ants are like the chemicals in my plants’ and at that point the light bulb went off in my head, which should have gone off much earlier, that the ants are the same as secondary compounds in plants, the things that give plants flavours and drugs and all those things. The plant is investing in the ants and supporting the ant colony instead of making chemicals inside of itself for defence. [GL] Stebbins was a plant ecologist - he didn’t know anything about insects - but when he heard me talk he realised that my ants were the equivalent of nicotine or morphine or opium or caffeine.”

“When one is reading a paper, one should really look at from a historical perspective. This particular paper was one of the first papers in a field that is now very well developed but did not exist at that time. Without that knowledge, one would probably get a very different impression of the paper. The caveats to the paper would be to do with issues related to doing laboratory assays on wild-caught birds and bringing them back into the wild to study their fitness, which we have been addressing over the next few years after the paper was published. We, and others, have published various papers on how these concerns may be alleviated or addressed. We also, now, have changed, substantially, how we do the statistical analysis of the papers, both in terms of whether we describe patterns versus a priori work out what sort of effects are muddled in our analysis, and in switching from frequentist approaches, where we were focusing, maybe obsessively, on p-values, to Bayesian approaches, where we are much more interested in estimating effect sizes. So, when I look back on this paper, I really see that the field has moved, mostly, forwards. That, I think, is a positive way to conclude a self-criticism of the papers that one has published.”

“When the paper was originally submitted to Science – which was probably in 1997, I am not sure exactly – it was rejected without review. At that time, I had intended to just let it go, but another colleague of mine at Santa Cruz by the name of Bruce Lyon, who is a behavioural ecologist, changed my mind. I happened to give a lecture to his class about this work. Bruce thought it was interesting and asked me where it would be submitted at the end of my lecture. I told him what had happened with Science and he urged me to challenge the decision, because he felt it was very important work. I had him look at the paper, he made a couple of suggestions, and I resubmitted the paper with a letter requesting that they re-evaluate it. And they reviewed and accepted it.”

“When we started to work on them our goal was to see how flexible this tool use was, and how sensitive it was to the needs of the task. In order to do that we placed two wires, one which was bent and one which was straight, on top of a vertical tube which contained a bucket in the bottom. We were trying to see if they [New Caledonian crows] would pick up the bent one to collect the bucket. In the experiment we had two individuals close together – a male and a female. The male was bigger and dominant over the female. What happened was the male picked the bent wire and took it away. The female, Betty, was left with only the straight wire with which she tried to retrieve the bucket but failed. What she then did was to basically jam the wire against the base of the tube and bend it [...] the first observation was made by my student Alex Weir, who became the first author of that report. Alex Weir had started his PhD six months earlier and so this was practically his first experiment [...] one day he came to us with this video. He said: well, my experiment didn’t work as planned because one of the crows took away the bent wire! Then this is what happened. And he showed us the video of Betty bending the wire. When I saw that I was completely bowled over. It was unbelievable.”

“When you feed a monkey group, the dominant monkey will try to grab everything. To avoid that, you hold a treat in one hand, off to the side, and try to tempt the dominant monkey over there, while not letting him have it and simultaneously feeding the other monkeys with the other hand. I was doing that with the peanuts and the dominant male, Ozzie, finally got frustrated with this. He ran back to the inside area of their enclosure and came back with a piece of monkey chow. He pushed it through the fence at me and tried to get the peanut. When I didn’t give it to him, he went back inside, where they had just gotten their fruit and vegetable trays, and returned with an orange peel. Then he did the same thing, pushing the orange peel through the fence at me. Again, I didn’t give him the peanut. Then he went inside again and came out with a whole quarter of an orange, which is quite large, of course, and he pushed that through the fence to me. I finally gave him the peanut, but it got me thinking, because I was relatively certain that if I walked up to Ozzie and offered him a choice between a single peanut and quarter of an orange, he would chose the quarter of the orange. If so, it was possible that he wanted the peanut because everybody else was getting one. Now, oranges weren’t a terribly limited resource, because they had just gotten their fruit and vegetable tray, so he could have gone inside and gotten another orange. But it was a very interesting interaction, and I really wanted to know whether my thought was right.”

“Where to begin? When I began graduate school, personal computers did not yet exist, or if they did, they were mostly used by hobbyists. Real computing power, which is now dwarfed by the laptop computer on which I am writing this, resided in massive room-filling machines that were time-shared by universities like Duke, UNC [University of North Carolina] Chapel Hill, and NC [North Carolina] State. The costs of running and maintaining those facilities were shared, and subvented to some extent, by charging users for the computer time used. I think this was mostly ‘funny money’, but major users were expected to pay for their computer use with grant funds. I was a minor user. One communicated with the computers using decks of IBM punch cards, read through a card reader, and results were returned some time later by a device called a line printer. It is now all delightfully archaic. About the time I finished my degree, it became possible to communicate directly with the time-shared machines using new things called video terminals. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven…The changes in computing power that I’ve seen since 1976 when I started graduate school, and the ease of use of computing technology for statistical analysis, graphics, modeling, and things we never dreamed we’d be using computers for are unfathomable for today’s typical undergraduate student.”

“Wherever I showed that result it was just dismissed. People felt it just cannot be true; it had to be wrong. I even had a friendly review where the reviewer said in the margin: my BS meter is ticking. Near the results section he had noted in the margin: my BS metre has exploded. There were no more comments after that. I wasn’t that good in English and so I asked Gary what BS means. He told me it was the "bullshit metre". This was the attitude to my result. Nobody believed it. This is actually why I ended up doing the Ecography paper. ”