profiles ISSN 1948‐6596 Interview with Robert E. Ricklefs, recipient of the 2011 Alfred Russel Wallace award by Rosemary G. Gillespie Division of Organisms and Environment, University of California at Berkeley, USA Rosemary Gillespie: You started working on is‐ lands as a new graduate student. Why islands? Robert E. Ricklefs: When I arrived at the Univer‐ sity of Pennsylvania to begin graduate studies with Robert MacArthur, he and Ed Wilson had just published their seminal paper in Evolution on the “theory of insular zoogeography.” It was only natural that I turned my attention to islands—and birds because I had for years been an avid bird‐ watcher, as was MacArthur; the West Indies be‐ cause James Bond at the Academy of Natural Sci‐ ences of Philadelphia had published a distribu‐ tional checklist. I quickly developed a scheme pos‐ tulating changes in bird distributions in the islands similar to Wilson’s “taxon cycle,” but MacArthur felt that historical hypotheses were untestable and discouraged further work. I slipped in some observations of bird distributions on the island of Jamaica one summer, which resulted in a 1970 publication, but did not return to the topic until I had become an Assistant Professor at Penn., and began a collaboration with George Cox, a superb ecologist and naturalist at San Diego State Univer‐ sity. My doctoral thesis at Penn. addressed issues in bird life histories—nothing on community ecol‐ ogy or biogeography. RG: You began your career in the 1960s, following in the footsteps of Hutchinson and MacArthur, and at a time when the ideas of Lotka and Volterra were highlighted, competitive exclusion was a new and important topic, along with related themes of niche specialization, ecological sorting, limiting similarity, and community saturation. How important were these in shaping your ideas and the field of biogeography in general? RER: One had to be impressed by the power of competition, and other types of interactions, re‐ vealed in experimental studies. Most ecologists brought up in the Hutchinsonian tradition be‐ lieved in niches and in resource limitation. These properties of systems were the basis for character displacement, density compensation, and other ecological and evolutionary phenomena. So, all these elements fit together well. Community satu‐ ration was perhaps the weakest aspect of the de‐ veloping theory, as this was difficult to demon‐ strate experimentally in natural systems, and simi‐ lar environments in different regions sometimes supported very different numbers of species. The degree to which species interactions constrained species ranges and probabilities of establishment following dispersal were harder to judge, although some ideas about biogeography, such as Jared Diamond’s checkerboard distribution patterns, had an essentially ecological foundation. RG: The 1960s were also the early days of plate tectonics, and the start of panbiogeography, cladistics and vicariance/dispersal debates. How much interaction did you see between these fields? How did they inform one another? How did discussions with the different players affect your thinking? RER: As an ecologist, these developments had relatively little influence on me. Ecologists were relatively indifferent to phylogenetics (as opposed to evolution) at the time, and to any kind of his‐ torical explanation, although we were very much interested in adaptive radiation, convergent evo‐ lution, character displacement, and evolutionary ecology. From my perspective, the debates con‐ cerning panbiogeography, cladistics, and vicari‐ ance/dispersal were peripheral issues, and the kind of biogeography involved in these debates seemed to have little connection to ecology. These were historical/geographical issues, and were not discussed widely among ecologists. Similarly, ‘island biogeography’ was consid‐ ered as distinct from ‘community ecology’. The frontiers of biogeography 3.1, 2011 — © 2011 the authors; journal compilation © 2011 The International Biogeography Society
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Jul 13, 2016
Zoyah Kinkead-Clark 
Open Access