Poor Aris has gone into a bit of a decline this week, the breeding season evolution manuscript has been rejected by Proceedings, this is not what is upsetting him so much as the fact that one of the referees was a friend of his (both of ours) and was deliberately unkind. My main task recently has been trying to understand the survival rates of trees. Strangely no previous estimates of survival have taken into account the fact that you are not certain to relocate trees that you have marked and so are likely to over estimate mortality rates. I have (this morning) largely completed this task and have pretty good estimates of survival of our tree species both as adults and saplings. The two swallow PhD students are doing well both getting to grips with the literature and to writing and expressing themselves in English. I have also this week had conversations with another possible PhD student from China who is interested in invasive plants - a very charming and intelligent young man. Meanwhile Greg has made good progress and has found that different tree species have different growing season lengths and (importantly) they respond to changes in temperature in different ways. The final research news is that the TREE article on philosophy of modelling is in its final version - 25 and is being checked by the other collaborators - hurrah!
