“This changes everything!” reportedly wrote Robert MacArthur, one of the most influential ecologists of all time, in a handwritten letter to a young Bob Paine sometime in the late 1960s (Roberts 2016). How foretelling those three words would be for the field of ecology. At the time, Bob was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of Washington and had just published his now seminal 1966 paper on keystone predation in The American Naturalist (Paine 1966). Community ecology was thriving, with exciting discussions of how many species could coexist in any community and what factors governed the composition of communities. Two theories dominated the conversation. One was that intense competition drove populations to evolve smaller and narrower niches through time, ultimately resulting in more species packing into each habitat (MacArthur 1957). The other idea was physiologically based and posited that species segregated predictably along physical gradients—living where they did best, resulting in diversity patterns generated by physical forcing (Whittaker 1962). Bob’s work showing that sea stars regulated species coexistence on rocky shores (Paine 1966) transformed the world of ecology for two reasons. First, he convincingly showed that consumers could be the keystones that maintained species richness in a community. Second, it helped to usher in a new era of field experiments and demonstrated the power of manipulations in nature (fig. 1). Although it would take another 20–30 years of dialogue and publications, ecology would shift in large part because of Bob’s findings, from one where physical factors were thought to predominately control species distribution patterns to one in which species interactions, as well as abiotic factors, did so.
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