“I first submitted the paper to American Naturalist, with both the data and the food web model I was talking about above. The reviewers liked it ok, but felt that the model and data didn’t match very well, and so it was rejected. So, we chopped out the model and decided to go for Nature, where it was accepted (after revisions of course). We eventually published the model that went along with it in the Ecological Niches book.”

“I forget what it was called, but libraries had this huge publication that listed all the literature. What I did was, every time I got a paper, I looked up and found everything that it cited. It was even more difficult because I had to find papers that may not have been on the topic but that had the relevant data. I think I still have my archives of about 3000 hard copies of different papers that went into this. The papers that had useful data were only a couple of hundred, but I had to go through the whole set of 3000 to know that. I remember going to the Royal library in Copenhagen, which is enormous and has a very good collection. Michael Rosenzweig went to Wisconsin when he was writing his book because Wisconsin was famous in the United States for being a very complete library. I went there too. I also went to Smithsonian, and spent an enormous amount of time in the Library of Congress. It took a lot of time because I needed to find everything. Even then, at the end, there were a couple of papers that I could never find.”

“I found the snakes while I was turning over logs and rocks to catch lizards (usually in the early morning, when the ground was cold and the reptiles were slow). They were a convenient size for lab trials on predation, and not venomous enough to be a risk.”

“I framed two studies for my post-doc: one on costs of reproduction, and one on the evolution of viviparity (live-bearing). For logistical reasons, I wanted to do the two studies on the same system.”

“I gave a talk at the Zoology department in Oxford and presented the data on the sequence of males and females visited. Alan attended the talk, came up to me afterwards and kindly offered to analyse the data as it is now presented in the paper.”

“I got a dissertation fellowship from the University of Minnesota that paid me a small stipend during the last year of my PhD, but Dave Tilman paid for many of the supplies that I used in the greenhouse. I asked Dave to be a co-author on the paper, but he said “no, Nancy, this is all your idea and your work.” He was a co-author on two other papers from Cedar Creek [...] but even on those papers I had to twist his arm to be a co-author. During his own PhD, Dave published a single-authored Science paper, and I think he recognized the importance of single-author work. Also, by that time, Dave was so successful that he didn’t need more papers on his CV.”

“I guess you could say it would be inappropriate to write a paper like this now. It would be a very different paper, it would be a review of how overfishing through time has changed. And it wouldn’t be published in Science, it would be published in some sort of Marine Ecology or Fisheries journal because the basic point would have been: been there, done that.”

“I had already visited small islands in the Gulf of Maine, north of Boston, where I had looked at [...] ground beetles. I had recognised that each island had a different number of species and a somewhat different set of species, and I thought it might be possible to remove them to test the theory. But I quickly realised, that winter, that I wouldn’t be able to census them for half the year. The seas were too rough and the weather was unbelievable. The islands were often covered with snow. Ed [Wilson], who had visited the Florida Keys said: “What about these little mangrove islands in the Florida Keys?” I went down there and looked, then he came down and looked with me, and we decided that they were about the right size.”

“I had been intrigued for a while by the idea that plants could communicate. Around 1981, David Rhoades told me that his work suggested this possibility. He observed that trees that were near neighbors that had been chewed by caterpillars became poor hosts for subsequent caterpillars. He was unable to repeat these results, and they were not properly replicated or controlled. Ian Baldwin and Jack Schultz conducted lab experiments and found a similar phenomenon. However, the whole line of inquiry was shut down when an influential paper by John Lawton convinced most ecologists that the notion that plants communicated was rubbish. Then, in 1990, a paper by Ted Farmer and Bud Ryan was sent to me to review. They presented rigorous evidence for communication between cut sagebrush and potted tomato plants, albeit in sealed jars in the lab. I found this paper quite convincing although it wasn’t clear to me that similar things occurred in nature, involving plants that co-occurred (unlike sagebrush and agricultural tomato).”

“I had been working in the Aleutians for more than 25 years at the time. And we were in the field every day from morning till evening. I usually worked with a team of four people during the later years. Early on, during the 70s and up to the early 80s, it was usually just two of us, and then after that it was commonly four. So, there were a lot of people, over a lot of days, over a lot of years, and when you sum it all up, the number of person hours in the field becomes very large.”

“I had created these little 2*2 meter cages in which we could put different insects or small mammals in. That experiment didn’t work very well because the small mammals didn’t cooperate. In some cages, they totally destroyed all the vegetation and in others they didn’t do anything except to sit in there and die.”

“I had gone to present our thinking about individual specialization, to Brad Shaffer’s lab meeting. I wasn’t in Brad Shaffer’s lab, but I thought it was a good opportunity to tell them what we were doing [...]. There was a tradition of hanging out and having a beer after lab meetings. And in that after-presentation time over some beers, we got into a fairly active discussion about how exactly you quantify these things. We pulled up [a] literature search there and then, and found a few possibilities. And we came up with some of our own, had a very late night brainstorming session and put together the bulk of that paper – at least the outline of it – there and then, that particular evening. I’d say it was one of the most productive single evenings I’ve ever had.”

“I had imagined at that time, mostly because this was the conventional wisdom, that the decline in Stellar sea lions was a consequence of some food related problem, either because of an oceanic regime shift or because of fisheries or some combination of those two things. I now think that interpretation was wrong. I didn’t realise it at the time, but subsequent evidence for food limitation in the sea lions is counter-indicated. The weight of evidence suggests that, in fact, the sea lions had lots of food. And so I believe that the sea lion decline and the otter decline are linked, and are probably linked in the way we had initially imagined, which is that the sea lion decline led to the sea otter decline. But the cause of the sea lion decline I now see as being fundamentally different from what I had thought at that time. I think the current evidence more strongly suggests that the killer whales were the cause of both declines. I didn’t recognise that at the time.”

“I had never been to the tropics, but envisioned tenting by myself in the upper Amazon. My PhD advisor, Robin Foster, who had lots of experience in the tropics, suggested I work on BCI [Barro Colorado Island], the premier field station of its day. That didn’t sound so glamorous, but he was of course right. The logistics of remote tenting are enormous, and there is no one to talk to. On BCI, I was profoundly inspired by watching more senior scientists do science.”

“I had this idea about fruit dispersal and group foraging in a little bat that both feeds on nectar and fruit. But these bats were very hard to study because they were very easily disturbed and would fly out of the roost whenever I tried to catch them. Vampire bats, on the other hand, were really common and very easy to work on. Around the same period of time – those three months – Jack Bradbury went to a regular bat meeting where he heard a German biologist – Uwe Schmidt – report that he saw vampire bats regurgitate blood to each other in his captive colony. Jack wrote me a letter and told me about that observation and said that, maybe, this might be something I wanted to think about. And so I actually began, at that time, trying to catch and band vampire bats, and then dreamed up the project that I subsequently did between ’78 and ’83.”

“I happened to be talking with Dan Boone, who was the manager of the Aleutian Islands Unit of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. He approached me and said the military – both the Navy and the US Air Force – were interested in having work done on sea otters at their respective military bases. Adak was a naval base and Shemya Island, where we worked some years later, was an Air Force base. There was a military programme, called the Legacy Programme, which was for doing wildlife and ecological research on US military bases. Some of that Legacy money had gone to those particular sites and the Aleutians Refuge was asked to advise the military on what to do. That’s how I got involved with it.”

“I have no reason to doubt the results, but Rechten et al. 1981 Anim. Behav. 29, 1276-77 corrected the theory, and Berec et al. 2003 Can. J. Zool. 81, 780 were unable to repeat the results in toto.”

“I have very fond memories, you know, from graduate school days, and even in the early days of my faculty job, of going to the library. And, at that time, the library was an intellectual centre. You would look and say, oh, what journals came out this week, and you would go look at them, and flip through these different papers that, you know, much of it is serendipity, and which you wouldn’t see in the modern era. So part of it was finding those papers, but the other part of it was, I feel that there was more acceptance in those days of the appropriateness of just sitting down and reading for a few hours. My impression is, certainly in my own case, it’s very difficult to do that. But I think even among graduate students, it’s not the way it once was.”

“I haven’t thought of anything. I mean, like I said, there is still a lot which is unexplained here, but I haven’t seen anything that contradicts, or finds a completely different explanation for, our results. Except for very long distance flights. I don’t know if anyone has really found other cues that bees could be using when they fly large distances.”

“I hope they will take away the connection between ecological theory and observation and their relevance to practical management. The results in this paper were vitally important in managing at least two threatened species of bird – the alala or the Hawaiian crow and the spotted owl. That is much clearer in the PNAS paper. But the ideas that these small populations are only going to last a few years and that they are probably going to last a little bit longer if the species are larger-bodied are actionable results. This is science that can make a difference. So, I think it is the connection between theory, an extraordinary and exceptional dataset and the application to real-world problem, is what students should really be taking away from reading this paper.”