Mayhew PJ. 2006. Discovering
evolutionary ecology: Bringing together ecology and evolution. Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Details/order
online
I see this as my most important contribution. It captures my view
of the field as a whole and shows how it knits together - something that
can't be found anywhere else, and I believe that very few researchers appreciate.
Aims to rectify what disappoints me about other evolutionary ecology books.
I tried to make it short and fun to read too. Cheap, quick and informative;
what have you got to lose?
34. Traynor RE & Mayhew PJ. 2005. Host range in solitary versus gregarious parasitoids: a laboratory experiment. Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata 117: 41-49. pdf
Sometimes life isn't as exciting as you'd hope. However uninspiring,
this paper does contain an important message about this question, and some
surprises too.
Ever got frustrated trying to explain the latitudinal gradient in
species richness? Me too! This cuts a swathe through the undergrowth. Originally
submitted to Journal of Animal Ecology, they spent two years deciding,
first that it wasn't ecology, and second that it wasn't novel. Amusingly,
TREE published an article with the same idea (but no data) the same year.
NERC decided that they didn't want to fund this, and given our experience
above they were probably correct. So Monika ended up with it as a masters
project: good for her!
Meghan wanted my Laelius and Aphaereta data and I happily
obliged. Her baby really, but it was nice to re-visit these questions.
See my earlier more-pioneering version below (10).
One of my favourite papers: supports a nice theory perfectly, and
has some cool new twists too. Highly recommended.
Squeezing yet more blood out of a stone, you say! If only I'd had
my hands on these data first, I could have saved them and parasitoids a
bad image.
Do you believe this paper? I thought
it left unanswered questions but it sailed in without a hitch!
I had mixed feelings about this
as I did it. It replaces anecdote with analysis, contains important and
novel messages about macroevolution, and I think the conclusions are correct.
However I always had the feeling that there were better ways of approaching
the question, if only I was better at maths and programming. Got my best
ever set of referees comments but has been completely ignored by everyone
since.
John and Dan's baby really, though I put them on the right track.
A bit long and wordy, and contains some impressively off-putting algebra.
"Join the crowd", they said! "Sure", I said! All I had to do was
identify loads of insects, do a parsimony analysis, and cut the text by
50%. Nice to be useful. So multi-disciplinary that none of the authors
actually understand the whole paper!
I am on this paper courtesy of Scott's charity. I guess it's some
repayment for all those trips to Banchory.
I was very excited about this as I did it, and I think the results
are reasonably robust. However, better analytical techniques are possible:
one simple improvement was made by Davis et al. (the angiosperm supertree
paper). The findings made page 2 of the Yorkshire Evening Press, under
a big picture of a lingerie model, capturing perfectly the excitement of
the day.
This review took b****y ages, but I was grateful to be able to spout
forth about comparative methods, seeing as I had by then got quite a bit
of experience with them. Amazing how quickly this went out of date (not
entirely - it's still mostly current).
Yes, nice work, and it has done quite well. Worth knowing about.
When the Scheirs et al. paper
landed on my desk to referee, I thought it was a nice twist on a subject
that was quite close to my heart. TREE thought so too.
Oikos eventually gave in and published this, though I made the mistake
of not including an abstract. It was my attempt to say that "body size
matters as much as clutch size, so let's focus on that", but has been so
ignored that when Cohen et al. re-awakened the issue in PNAS in 2005, they
didn't even make the connection with this paper.
Once again, the Boivin & van Baaren paper landed on my desk to
referee, and I thought it was worth a note in TREE. However, everyone else
has obviously decided that it's not of general relevance.
Aimless data collection makes for aimless papers. There are a few
nice findings though: a suggestion that egg size affects offspring fitness,
and unmated females take longer to lay, and sex ratio increasing with mother's
age (probably an indication of sperm depletion). This might explain the
mysteries of paper 4 (below).
Ian wrote this and I was happy to agree with him.
Close to my favourite piece of work: I am still really proud of this,
and it was the beginning of a long affair with Aphaereta.
Also quite proud of this one. Everyone thought that these data were
good-for-nothing. But they were just waiting for the right questions to
be asked. Cool.
Having conquered Phylogenetic Regression, if that's possible for
anyone other than Alan Grafen, Ole wanted help with fish. Annoyingly, this
is my most highly cited primary research paper, which says a lot about
how impact is affected by colour, size, sex and notochords, but also a
lot about how good Ole is.
This paper has done fairly well, and the ideas behind it were good.
Ian's baby really, but I think we made a good team and it was immensely
enjoyable. There are some open issues though: what, for example, does relative
male thorax volume really signify? Does a cross-species trend mean anything
without contrast support? The latter issue made its way into 23 (above).
Ian's idea, and I was happy to agree. This note subsequently transmuted
into part of the book chapter above too (23).
This resulted from my discovery of MacClade. These days, referees
would expect greater exploration of the parsimony assumptions, but in those
days nobody thought about those issues much - the defaults were a God-given
truth! My feeling is that the conclusions would stand up to a fuller analysis,
but I doubt if anyone can be bothered.
Sitting in Stamford University library in July 1995, killing time,
I came across Charnov & Downhower's version of Ebert's model. I thought
"that'll be testable on Laelius then". And it was. If I were doing
it again, I would make a slight adjustment to the bootstrap analysis, but
I think the approach I used then is, if anything, conservative. Subsequent
re-analysis (32) confirms the original conclusions.
One of my original aims when I went to Leiden was do to a massive
comparative analysis of traits associated with small gregarious broods.
However the associated traits were so diverse, and the data on relatives
of these species so difficult to come by, that this mighty project collapsed
into a descriptive rant. The main message is a serious one though, and
I think still holds.
When I started my PhD what I really wanted to do with my life was
collect obscure facts about dragonflies (reality kicked in shortly afterwards).
This was the result, and it originated with discussions with Alex Kacelnik
when I was doing my undergraduate project. I spent b****y ages teaching
myself both Pascal and dynamic programming, and all I ended up doing was
re-creating McNamara et al.'s results. Oh well, you can't win 'em
all.
Another candidate for the award for "most time spent for least reward".
I now use this as an example of how not to write a scientific paper.
Collecting all that data for paper 9 (above), I noticed that many
of them were bethylids, and that therefore there might be something special
about that group. So I delved further. I spent a very happy few months
in Leiden Natural History Museum Library compiling the data from some very
obscure papers, and then an equally happy two weeks with Ian in Aarhus
analyzing it. The page charges Am. Nat. insisted on still grate though.
Ecology Letters had just started up and was desperate to fill its
pages. We were happy to oblige.
My favourite experimental study so far. It was a real shot in the
dark, but paid off, and I still marvel at an animal that can do this.
Soon after starting my PhD, Charles
introduced me to a leaf-miner system, intending that I work on its parasitoids.
I found the miner just as exciting (hence paper 7 above), and it opened
an ever-expanding world that I wanted to share. This is the result. My
most highly cited paper; something that I guessed would happen before I
wrote it.
Working on Laelius for paper 4, above, I soon noticed that
they liked killing their own eggs if you didn't remove them from their
clutch. This got me thinking about ovicide, and the result was this paper.
This involved some of the most labour-intensive experiments I have ever
done, and got me into trouble for missing several lab. meetings. I was
also embarrassed to find out late in the day that I had completely mistaken
which end of the eggs the wasp larvae hatch from!
My undergraduate project, and published before I really understood
ANOVA, so take the F ratios with a pinch of salt! The conclusions are probably
correct though. The journal sent this to be refereed by my project supervisor,
Peter Miller, who funnily recommended acceptance.