“I invented those terms in my book, and they caught on. I realized that Ed Wilson was very good at inventing terms, you know, going back to “pheromone” and “sociobiology” and lots of other terms, and I needed descriptive terms to capture a concept and make people think about it. One way to do this is to create terms that everybody finds useful as shorthand for the concept. They’re not perfect, because they are too short and they can’t really capture the variety of meaning. But, you know, "dispersal assembly" and "niche assembly" captured some of the elements that I needed to help organize discussion and thinking about community ecology.”

“I know exactly how I made the figures. I had a light table and I had very good black pens. That figure was drawn by hand. In fact, looking at it now, enlarging it, I can make out that it is drawn by hand; in one place it doesn’t connect up very well. But this was just before the ability to do figures on computers became available.”

“I know that we had access to online searching, well before that paper, at our library. We didn’t necessarily do it ourselves, but we could file a search, some search terms, and see what came up. We couldn’t do what you can do today – go to Google Scholar, type in “Ecosystem Engineer*” and see what comes up.”

“I learned a tremendous amount in writing it. It was over two years I spent writing that paper and doing that research. And I enjoyed testing the limits of the editors to see how much humour or salacious metaphor or whatever I could put in the paper. And I had the sense that the paper was going to be influential simply because previous critiques that had tried to assess the frequency of statistical problems in the literature never told the authors of the papers they were criticizing that they were being criticized. They didn’t cite them! And so I thought that aspect alone would get people’s attention quickly.”

“I learned the basics of multivariate statistics and discriminant analysis by myself and found help in the Faculty of Engineering to run my analyses on a computer with the help of a programmer, as things were done at that time. Using a computer at that time was done through punched cards. I had to prepare my data and computer runs on special sheets of paper, which were then transcribed by a keypuncher and fed into the computer through a card reader by a certified programmer. Biologists could not get anywhere close to the computer at the time.”

“I literally dropped everything, ran to the library and started finding everything I could. I started reading everything I could. Of course, nothing was online in those days. I took out every book I could – those of interest were mostly in the social sciences at that time. And one of the books I read was the book by Larry Hedges and Ingram Olkin on the statistics of meta-analysis. And I just pored through that book and thought, “Okay, this is something we could do in ecology.” I learned everything I could about the statistics and practice of meta-analysis from the books I could find.”

“I look back on it and I see how we did things in the past, which was very different from how we do things now. That is not, necessarily, meant to criticize the paper, but rather to illustrate that we are learning as we go. I, sometimes, do that with students. I point out how we do things very differently now and how, maybe, in the past, we did some things that we now consider “wrong” – particularly in terms of statistics. But then, I emphasize the point that this was the best that we could do then. It’s good to look at papers very critically, but you should also always look at them from this more historical perspective. This is, of course, difficult if you’re a very young and naive reader; you don’t have this perspective. And that might, sometimes, make our students very critical, maybe more critical than what they should be. But, certainly, I sometimes look back at these papers, partly nostalgically, but also partly to understand how we did things in the past and how we have improved the way we do our research.”

“I lost almost 50% of my plots to accidents of one kind or another – the owner of the field site changed their mind, there was a storm, there was too much rain, the city decided to put a water pipeline through the middle of my plot! I mean all kinds of things; I lost a lot. If I was advising a student today about doing this kind of fieldwork research I would advise them to set up a lot of plots and anticipate that a big number of them – 50% of them – are going to be destroyed over the next two years.”

“I made radio-transmitters with little waistbands that were designed so that when the waistband stretched the pulse rate of the radio would change. Using this I hoped to get remote data on how much the bat had fed. I made the device, put it on the bat and it worked. But, I also had to make holes in the membranes of the bat’s wing to get the waistband on and it would still slide off the bat’s belly when it fed. I eventually decided it was too intrusive. The main advantage today would be better video technology, but doing what I did would still be hard – you still need to get into the hollow, and keep the bats in view, which often requires squirming around inside the roost. So, I think what Gerald Carter did – work with a good captive population – is the way forward.”

“I made the first version of the figure which was then redrawn in ink by a departmental lab assistant, Aino Falk Wahlström, skilled at illustration work.”

“I picked that plot in Gothic because it was close to my lab, and had a good mixture of the two species of wildflowers I wanted to use, as well as a good population of bees.”

“I picked the site after going to many, many different places. San Felasco is just a fantastic Preserve. It was one of the biggest in the region and it’s also easy to get to. It has old growth forest in it and a whole range of different habitats. That preserve, alone, has 14 or 15 of the total oak species in it and was the obvious place to get most of the species. It has so much heterogeneity in habitat and all three of the main community types there. That was the best place to get most of the species in close proximity. Because I had to access most of the tree canopies with an aerial lift, having them all in one location made fieldwork simpler.”

“I prepared the other figures using SigmaPlot. This was one of my first times using this software and I complained about it a lot. Anurag Agrawal had to hold my hand repeatedly as I attempted to shrug off my Luddite tendencies.”

“I read an article in The Boston Globe about a study that had been done in the educational literature that asked the question: “Were boys really smarter than girls in mathematics?” which seemed inherently very interesting to me. And the answer was, “No, they’re not.” It was based on a study of children in elementary school grades. And what they had done was combined the results of many different studies using a meta-analysis. Well, I had never heard of meta-analysis before, and I was instantly electrified by the concept. And they explained in this newspaper article that this was a relatively new statistical technique to combine the results of separate studies to reach general conclusions and to resolve apparent discrepancies and results among studies. And I thought, “Wow, this is something!” I immediately was knocked off my seat. I thought this is something that we could use to resolve these questions about the effects of competition in ecology, because there had been many studies with many different results. And I thought this would be an amazing tool to introduce to ecology.”

“I really didn’t start collecting data in earnest until the third field season, the third summer, after joining graduate school. Now I feel like people are much more pressured to start much earlier than that. And it was kind of nice because, you know, Bill [Hamilton] didn’t really care and it was all time well spent.”

“I remember being at a meeting of the Evolution Society, and there was a whole symposium on Niche Theory. I remember thinking, gee, there is symposium on that, and remarking to myself, I used to be active in that area.”

“I remember getting a large number of reprint request cards in the mail. You don’t see those any more, either. Oh yes, in the days before pdfs, we sent out things called reprints to people who requested them”

“I remember on the first day of fieldwork I had failed to take insect repellent with me. As soon as I entered the first forest patch I was ambushed by mosquitoes so I had to make a hasty retreat to get better prepared. I remember that I really enjoyed being in the woods by myself early in the morning. I remember climbing over fences with a backpack full of field gear. I worked alone except for one day during the trapping period when my sisters were in town and they wanted to come with me. That was a bad idea. I was doing the removal experiment for recruitment estimation, which meant I had to move the captured mice to another woodlot several km away. My sisters seemed incapable of opening a trap without letting the mouse go, so this created a bit of a blip in my data.”

“I remember we submitted it first, we got, sort of, a reject and resubmit, we went away and did a bit more work, and then it went back to review again. I think we got minor revisions. We may have even submitted it to Nature first – I can’t remember exactly – but they rejected it with some comments.”

“I rough-drafted them, either by pencil and ruler on graph paper or by computer [...]. Then Cheryl Hughes, the Zoology Department artist at UW-Madison, rendered them in Indian ink on parchment. This was the common practice for scientific illustration at that time.”