The summer has been too short after what was a dreadful, and dreadfully long year. I had targeted pushing forward and hopefully completing six papers. While I might have pushed most of them on, only one has been completed. The manuscript that I wrote two years ago on environmental and genetic sources of variation on great tit immune function has finally been finished and submitted. Of the others, the TREE article is almost finished but has suffered from the ‘contribution’ from one very difficult collaborator - this should be submitted in a week or two. Aris and I put the breeding season evolution paper on the shelf for the summer, to give us some space after which we could come back and look at it again, we have now done that and we will be submitting that paper to Proc R Soc in a few weeks. The GxE paper though has not gone anywhere. Proceedings of the R Soc has accepted the proposal for a paper on ‘how to do systems ecology’, I did work on the draft of this and sent it to Volker Grimm for the next stage of working. I have also managed to do the GO analysis that is needed for the zebra finch genomics paper, I need to obtain a more up-to-date GO annotation before I can take this any further though. Apart from that we went to Wytham Woods and did some very useful fieldwork which should see the parameterisation of SORTIE UK this autumn.
The photograph at the top of the page was taken in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia which we visited on our brief trip to Malaysia and Australia in July.
