Papers In Play.

It's been a distracting week, so I apologize for not writing for a few days. My wife has been sick so I've had to help her do various rabbit rescue errands more than is typical. But, things are happening.

I received reviewers' comments on the telescope shiner article on Monday from American Midland Naturalist. The editor said it's unacceptable as is, but I know that we can improve it in a range of ways to make it acceptable to everyone. I made some stupid omissions and errors in the manuscript, in part because I was trying to write very concisely. So for a change I underwrote a manuscript instead of overwriting. For instance, our graph of monthly GSI values runs from February through September, but we only report on oocyte condition and size for February through July. This is because in August and September the gonads are so regressed that no meaningful measurements are possible. But, I neglected to explicitly say this in even the one good sentence that it would need, so both reviewers rightfully wondered what was going on. Gad! So finally, today, I finally started to work on fixing various things, with help from Andrew.

One thing one reviewer in particular wanted was color images of our variously described oocyte stages, and ovary maturity stages. We have them up the wazoo, so it's relatively minor for us to find good images in two series and send them off. As usual, you have to leave your ego behind when reading reviewers' comments, I've moved beyond the stage of feeling retarded with knowledge that we can make this manuscript much better.

I also uploaded the scarlet shiners "brains" article to NeuroReport on Tuesday. That article has plenty of digital images included showing Western blots of NMDA receptor proteins. I think (as usual) it's a good piece of work. The editors at this journal go for fast decisions on submitted material, so I think we'll know soon.

And finally, to complete the trifecta, on Monday I mailed off the Stallsmith & Bedingfield black darter article to Southeastern Naturalist. They accept email submissions of manuscripts now, but their limit is 10 megs of material; because we have a bunch of digital images saved as high resolution .pdf's, the manuscript is over 12 megs in size so I burned it to a CD and mailed it off to the office in Maine (yeah, SENat's editorial office is in Maine!). And as usual, I hope they're favorably impressed.