Science is built on trust. Trust that your experiments will work. Trust in your collaborators to pull their weight. But most importantly, trust that the data we so painstakingly collect are accurate and as representative of the real world as they can be.

And so when I realized that I could no longer trust the data that I had reported in some of my papers, I did what I think is the only correct course of action. I retracted them.
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Retractions are seen as a comparatively rare event in science, and this is no different for my particular field (evolutionary and behavioral ecology), so I know that there is probably some interest in understanding the story behind it. This is my attempt to explain how and why I came to the conclusion that these papers needed to be removed from the scientific record.
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