This temporal coincidence makes it difficult to separate cell death from dendritic atrophy and while we have no explanation as to why under our experimental conditions, no significant RGC death (determined by nuclear staining) can be observed during the first week following explantation, we think that our much earlier detection of dendritic atrophy may be explained by a combination of the use of an unbiased labelling method (Sherazee & Alvarez, 2013) coupled with the underreporting dendritic pruning when using Thy1‐YFP animals (Williams et al., 2013). This evidence concerns the gene THY1 and Atrophy.