“Early on, Peter Grant told me that we should write a short follow-up paper to make the methods more accessible to the average reader. Unfortunately, we did not take that advice and the paper is, today, still a very difficult read. [...] I often think that if we had followed Grant’s advice we might have saved hundreds of users from going astray.”

“Early on, Peter Grant told me that we should write a short follow-up paper to make the methods more accessible to the average reader. Unfortunately, we did not take that advice and the paper is, today, still a very difficult read. Arnold 1983 (American Zoologist) comes close to providing what Peter was asking for, but it does not discuss the details that can snag a user. Stinchcombe et al. 2008 (Evolution) discuss a misunderstanding of the method that has snagged many users. I often think that if we had followed Grant’s advice we might have saved hundreds of users from going astray.”

“Editors these days might not let me get away with such a chatty style. But I enjoy reading papers where you feel you are out there with the researcher, watching the animal and eavesdropping on the study. These days, of course, statistical analysis and quantification and use of computers has changed the way we do research for the better. There is absolutely no question about that. But I do think that people quite often get beguiled by numbers and statistics and lose track of the natural history, which I think should always be the starting point. I think observation from natural history is the most interesting thing and if you then can combine that with statistics and modelling then that’s great. But complicated statistics and numbers for the sake of it just makes the whole study dull.”

“Emlen used these funnels and inkpads on the ground. The birds would sit on ink pads and when they try to leave the cage they produced these footprints on a white paper. In our technique, developed by Wiltschko and Helbig, we used rubber paper on which the feet, and especially the nails or claws, produce small scratches. These scratches are much more easily counted and investigated. For analysing all these scratches we have developed a specific computer program, which would take all the papers with the scratches and calculate the mean value of the direction [of migration] and other necessary statistical values.”

“Erick Greene [was] a professor at the University of Montana. I’ve known Erick for a long time. He does a lot of song recordings, and he kindly offered to make spectrograms for me. He did it in a few minutes, whereas it would take me days.”

“Everything fell apart. I carefully followed the published instructions, but when I tried to stain VAM fungi in roots, I ended up with a bunch of disconnected xylem elements and cortical cells. When I tried to extract spores from the tailings – and looked at my spore extracts through the microscope – all I could see was a bunch of sand and random organic matter. It was a seriously low period of my master’s studies. In the early 80’s, nobody at UW-Madison studied mycorrhizae, and I had no idea what VAM fungi REALLY looked like! I suddenly realized how naïve I had been to think that I could simply read about mycorrhizal techniques in a book and then successfully measure them.”

“Experimental testing of a conspicuous male ornament potentially involved in female choice was not a far-fetched approach. In fact, I had been thinking about this possibility for a long time, but then with the epitome of male ornaments in mind: the train of the peacock. I explored possibilities for doing such a field experiment during a visit to Sri Lanka in 1979, but found that such a study of peacocks in the wild would be difficult for several reasons. The lek sites I found in a national park were in jungle with plenty of elephants and wild buffalo around; not an ideal situation. In addition, manipulating trains of unwilling peacocks in the wild seemed to present some problems of its own.”

“First of all, I observed there were helpers at the nest. And at that time I did not have the book so I was surprised to see adult birds that were sexually mature that did not reproduce themselves but helped other birds raising their offspring and incubating the egg. And then I also found out that the whole island was covered with territories. There was no empty space left on the island for other birds to establish new territory. So I thought maybe habitat saturation was a driver for cooperation. And then I mentioned this to a lecturer I knew in Holland. And he said, oh, you should read that book by Krebs and Davies. It was one of my old lecturers, and then he sent a copy of the chapter on cooperative breeding of that book to me (it took 3-4 weeks for the post to get it to me). I read that chapter and I realized that cooperation sort of has been observed in other bird species and mammalian species. However, I did observe other things which were not written in the book chapter. But at least, the book chapter formed the basis for my thinking.”

“First, the problem I was trying to solve is still out there – how do we determine how environmental impacts such as species extinction ramify through complex natural communities? Therefore I think it is a problem still worth pursuing. In the discussion group, I think the students found it most interesting to hear how the paper developed from a simple question that in the end I didn’t have enough statistical power to really answer (the orange snail morph occurred at too low a frequency in the experiment, though the pattern was in the right direction) to something that made a useful contribution to a different area of ecology and evolution. I would encourage students these days to make more of an effort to link their data to more mechanistic models than those represented by path analysis. That being said, I have to admit that path analysis has so far worked more effectively than my proposed modified approach to estimate dynamical models with the data, which raises the question of why this might be. I would also raise the caveats about reciprocal interactions outlined above, and additionally point to one of Petraitis and Dunham’s most important criticisms — the perceived strength of interactions is influenced in part by the degree to which particular species are varied by the environment or an experiment. For example, if I hadn’t manipulated birds, the natural variability of birds is relatively low so a path analysis would likely not pick up their effects very well. What you make of that depends on one’s interest. Is one interested in how important the observed natural variability is, or is one interested in the potential impact an outside perturbation will have on a system?”

“For me what is striking is that there is a lot in that paper that has not fundamentally changed. What has happened instead is massive enrichment and development. The addition of detail, from modelling to empiricism, and the connections that have then arisen to other areas of Ecology and other disciplines are notable. The core message of that paper was that we should focus our attention on physical modification of the environment by organisms because it is pervasive and we have sort of marginalized it. That’s not true anymore; it is not marginalized now. As an ecosystem ecologist, I would have to say that just focusing on engineering alone is not going to get you there, any more than just focusing on trophic interactions will explain all of Ecology. But I’m surprised by how much of this is still relevant. In the questions you sent me you asked me whether or not I would ask a student to read it. I would ask her or him to read it and then read something more recent. I guess if a student has read it – I would then ask him or her – did you know that already? If you did, has it in anyway influenced your thinking. Is it already embedded in your mental map of what Ecology is about?”

“For practical reasons, I caught three-spined stickleback from ponds behind Bochum University where I did my dissertation. Sticklebacks were easy to get and they were already a model organism for behaviour research since Tinbergen’s Nobel Prize winning studies.”

“For the first few years after this came out, I kept count for a while. I had over 2000 requests for reprints. And this was at a time when you didn’t send PDFs. So I had to keep getting more money from my dean to pay the cost of running off, you know, another couple hundred copies every once in a while.”

“Frankly, it became overwhelming. This was just such a big effort, it became really overwhelming to do more with it. [...] I was also involved with a lot of other things going on at the same time. So some of that we never really looked at again, we never published it, which is kind of a shame because we went to a lot of work to collect that data.”

“Gray Merriam was my MSc thesis supervisor. He had experience working with Peromyscus leucopus which is the reason I selected that species for the field study.”

“He was able to genotype 30 microsatellite loci while I did only seven allozyme markers, which was actually pretty good. The other thing he was able to do is to record and do playbacks of ultrasonic calls. That technology was not available to me. To record ultrasound you needed a high speed tape recorder, which was a great big bulky thing with big batteries and very expensive. I didn’t have one of those. Today, doing the same is still not cheap, but much cheaper than earlier. And less cumbersome.”

“Henry [Wilbur] had an enlightened and generous philosophy about authorship. This probably came from his own experience at the University of Michigan. Basically, if he wasn’t involved in the set-up, data collection, analysis, and writing, he didn’t see the point in being a coauthor. I have applied the same rationale to my own students, though you don’t see that happening very much anymore. It wasn’t unusual in 1983 to see mostly single-authored papers in Ecological Monographs or Ecology. Now it’s rare.”

“Henry Wilbur’s research at the time was focused on amphibians in the Sandhills, so much of my early field experience in graduate school involved visiting ponds with Henry and his other students, sampling the ponds to see what lived there, and learning about what was common and rare. One thing was obvious: newts were abundant and nearly ubiquitous. They were the top predator, or one of the top predators, in most ponds. That made them a logical thing to study. There was also a high diversity of frogs breeding in the ponds, which made the question of what allowed so many ecologically similar species able to coexist an interesting one.”

“Heraldo [Vasconcelos] was the advisor and I was a student. But our relationship has always been more than that, because we became friends and his family (his wife Doris and his children Clara and Pedro) became my family in Manaus. Heraldo had recently finished his PhD in England and I was his first student, so at that time he could give me a lot of attention. He taught me how to use computers, ecology and statistics, set the time for translating an article in English to prepare me for the English proficiency test for the INPA [Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia] master’s degree etc. In short, he was very important in my academic career.”

“Herb Bormann and I submitted a proposal to the National Institutes of Health, around the idea that we could use the chemistry of stream water much like a physician uses the chemistry of blood and urine to diagnose the health of the patient. We thought that was a reasonable metaphor. The reviewers didn’t like it at all and turned it down flat, so we revised and submitted to the National Science Foundation, and were funded for three years, at a very small amount of money, to start the project. That’s how it began.”

“How did I draw them? I plotted them. There was a Calcomp plotter in our computer centre, and you could feed in files of numbers and, you know, there were some function calls you could make – I don’t remember how it works – and I figured out how to draw these axes and plot these figures. And they’re very crude symbols. I mean, the symbols are little squares, and then up here, it’s a rather weird looking little asterisk, in which the diagonal lines are longer than the vertical and horizontal lines. We don’t draw asterisks that way, usually. That was what the plotter produced if you gave it the figure of an asterisk, and there’s some other way you could tell it to put a square. So I had to do all that in the computer and have it computer-plotted.”