My first publication was in the journal Science (which allows me to joke that my publication history has been downhill from there); oddly, for someone in my position, the article didn’t involve social influence or social psychology or even human behavior. It concerned ethology, and it emerged from an observation I’d made in an undergraduate laboratory class in which we were recording the conditioned responding of earthworms to electric shock. Things weren’t proceeding well with the earthworm I was trying to condition; so I secured a second worm, putting it into the same small box where the first had been repeatedly buzzed and had secreted a creamy precipitate from its skin. Soon, I became the shocked party, as I witnessed my new subject begin trying frantically to escape up the walls. After getting the same reaction from a third and fourth worm, I called over the lab instructor to watch. Wide-eyed, he said, “I think we’ve found an alarm pheromone (a chemical signal certain animals send out to alert conspecifics to danger) that hasn’t been recorded before.” With a pair of his graduate students, we explored the reliability and functionality of the phenomenon, after which we successfully submitted a report to Science.