Revisiting Brown 1988

In a paper published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology in 1988, Joel Brown developed a method to use a forager's giving up density on a resource patch to understand energetic, predation and missed opportunity costs of foraging and then demonstrated its utility, through field experiments, on an Arizonian desert rodent community. Twenty-nine years after the paper …

Revisiting Johnsingh 1983

In a paper published in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society in 1983, AJT Johnsingh reported the findings of his study on large mammalian predators and prey in Bandipur Tiger Reserve, Karnataka. This study formed part of Johnsingh's PhD dissertation on dholes, likely the first PhD in wildlife biology by an Indian biologist. …

Revisiting Daniels et al. 1992

In a paper published in PNAS in 1992, RJ Ranjit Daniels, NV Joshi and Madhav Gadgil reported that bird richness declined with increasing woody plant diversity and vertical stratification in natural evergreen forests in Uttara Kannada district of the Western Ghats, India - a pattern that ran counter to what was generally believed at that …

Revisiting Packer et al. 1990

In a paper published in The American Naturalist in 1990, Craig Packer, David Scheel and Anne Pusey used field data on lions from Serengeti National Park to argue against a dominant idea at the time: grouping patterns are determined only by foraging success. Packer and colleague's observations suggested, instead, that grouping patterns are linked to …

Revisiting Cavender-Bares et al. 2004

In a paper published in The American Naturalist in 2004, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, David Ackerly, David Baum and Fakhri Bazzaz provided an explanation for the maintenance of oak diversity in local communities in North Central Florida. Cavender-Bares and colleagues found that co-occurring oaks are more distantly related that expected by chance, a pattern resulting from convergence …

Revisiting Pauly et al. 1998

In a paper published in Science in 1998, Daniel Pauly, Villy Christensen, Johanne Dalsgaard, Rainer Froese and Francisco Torres Jr., using the Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO's) global fisheries catch data, showed that the mean trophic level had declined over the period of 1950 to 1994. In other words, fisheries, over this period, was moving …

Revisiting Rainey & Travisano 1998

In a paper published in Nature in 1998, Paul Rainey and Michael Travisano showed that identical populations of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluroescens diversify morphologically when provided with ecological opportunity, but show no divergence when opportunity is restricted. Further, the morphs follow a predictable sequence of evolution maintained by competition. These results provided support for the …

Revisiting Şekercioğlu et al. 2002

In a paper published in PNAS in 2002, Çağan Şekercioğlu, Paul Ehrlich, Gretchen Daily, Deniz Aygen, David Goehring and Randi Sandi showed. using data from forest fragments in Costa Rica, that the ability to move through the deforested matrix was the best predictor of persistence of understory insectivorous birds in small forest fragments. Bird diets, …

Revisiting Srivastava & Lawton 1998

In a paper published in The American Naturalist in 1998, Diane Srivastava and John Lawton, using experiments on tree hole insect communities, tested the "more individuals hypothesis", the idea that more productive support higher species richness because they have a greater number of individuals. Srivastava and Lawton found that more productive tree holes had higher …

Revisiting Ritchie et al. 1998

In a paper published in Ecology in 1998, Mark Ritchie, David Tilman and Johannes Knops reported the results of their 7-year long field experiment to examine the effects of herbivores on nitrogen cycling in a nitrogen-limited oak savanna. The results of their study suggested that herbivores, by reducing the abundance of plants with ntirogen-rich tissues, …