Revisiting Clutton-Brock and Albon 1979

In a paper published in Behaviour in 1979, Tim Clutton-Brock and Steve Albon showed, using observations and playback experiments, that red deer stags use roaring contests to assess each other's fighting abilities when there aren't any obvious size discrepancies. Twenty-seven years after the paper was published, I spoke to Tim Clutton-Brock (with inputs from Steve …

Revisiting Haddad et al. 2003

In a paper published in Ecology in 2003, Nick Haddad,  David Bowne, Alan Cunningham, Brent Danielson, Douglas Levey, Sarah Sargent and Tim Spira, synthesized findings from a large-scale experiment to show that corridors aided movement between habitat patches, although the strength of the effect varied across taxa. Fourteen years after the paper was published, I …

Revisiting West and King 1988

In a paper published in Nature in 1988, Meredith West and Andrew King demonstrated  that that a wing stroke visual display by female cowbirds, which don't sing, plays a role in song learning of male cowbirds. The findings of the study provided evidence for the role of visual stimulation in song development, a process that …

Revisiting Gillespie 2004

In a paper published in Science in 2004, Rosemary Gillespie demonstrated that both dispersal and in situ speciation contribute to accumulation of species numbers of Tetragnathid spiders on Hawaiian islands. Moreover, accumulation, whether through dispersal or speciation, happens in a way that no island contains more than one species of a particular ecomorph, i.e. in …

Revisiting O’Brien et al. 1983

In a paper published in Science in 1983, Stephen O'Brien, David Wildt, David Goldman, Carl Merril and Mitchell Bush showed that the cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) had extremely low levels of genetic diversity, a pattern that they interpreted as resulting from a population bottleneck. This study was one of the first to apply genetic tools to …