When mapping the actors involved in this controversy, we identified three main teams. The first one, working on the size of  the Soay Sheep, comprises Tim Coulson, Arpat Ozgul and Alastair Wilson. They focus mainly on population dynamics and evolutionary biology. This team can be divided in two: the Imperial College of London section and the University of Edinburgh. This first team is in relation with a second one, Jon Slate and Jake Gratten from the University of Sheffield, who work on the colour of Soay Sheep from the perspective of genetics. Finally, Shane Maloney from the University of Western Australia, who also works on colour — but from a physiological point of view, is quite isolated as nobody agrees with his thesis.

Indeed, in December 2009, he and his team published a paper in Biology Letters which offered a physiological explanation for the shrinking of Soay sheep instead of Gratten’s purely genetic theory. In April 2010, Gratten and his team responded to this by also publishing a paper in Biology Letters which deconstructed Maloney’s statistical evidence, thus discrediting his theory (based on thermo-regulation and physiology). In October 2010, Maloney and his team answered to insist on the fact that they did not reject Gratten’s theory but offered an alternative explanation to the phenomenon of shrinking sheep.

Here is more information on the different scientists directly involved:

Tim Coulson is a biologist at the Department of Life Sciences of Imperial College of London. His field of study is population dynamics. He is the leader of a group of population biologists studying conservation, population dynamics and bio-demography.
http://www.bio-demography.org/

Arpat Ozgul is an ecologist and works at the Division of Biology of the Imperial College of London. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Zoology Department of the University of Cambridge.
http://www.arpat.net/

Alastair Wilson works at the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences and the School of Biological Sciences of the University of Edinburgh. He uses quantitative genetics to study evolutionary biology, and is the leader of the Wild Evolution Group who studies the evolution and ecology of wild animal populations.
http://wildevolution.biology.ed.ac.uk/index.html

Jon Slate and Jake Gratten work at the Animal and Plant Sciences Department as well as the Molecular Ecology Laboratory of the University of Sheffield. Their field of study is evolutionary genetics. Slate is the leader of a group who studies the “microevolutionary processes in wild populations” by “combining data from long term field and lab ecological studies with (…) genomics technologies and statistical genetic approaches”.
http://www.jon-slate.staff.shef.ac.uk/

Shane Maloney is a professor at the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology of the University of Western Australia. His field of study is comparative physiology, with a particular focus on thermal physiology.
http://www.uwa.edu.au/people/Shane.Maloney

We also interviewed scientists who are not represented on the mapping because they don’t work specifically on Soay sheep. They include:

Yoram Yom-Tov, a zoologist of the Life Sciences Department of Tel-Aviv University. One of his numerous research interests is the factors affecting body size of birds and mammals.
http://www.tau.ac.il/lifesci/zoology/members/yom-tov/

Jen Sheridan, now a post-doctoral student at the University of Alabama, and David Bickford, “evolutionary ecologist, conservation biologist, and tropical herpetologist”, at the Department of Biological Sciences of the National University of Singapore. The Evolutionary Ecology and Conservation Laboratory where they both worked focuses on amphibian and reptile ecology, evolution, and conservation.
http://www.dbs.nus.edu.sg/lab/evol-ecol/people.html
http://www.dbs.nus.edu.sg/lab/evol-ecol/Jen.html