More Gill Parasites in Scarlet Shiners? And the Limestone Creek Aquarium.

Christian has been steadily examining shiners over the past two weeks, and we're going out to collect more on Monday, weather allowing. Interestingly, of late she's been finding a relatively high occurence of Dactylogyrus gill parasites on scarlet shiners, certainly relative to striped shiners. I'm not sure what it means yet, but once we have 100-200 fish examined I hope to see a pattern.

I realize that my new 20-gal. aquarium is best described as a Limestone Creek tank, with fish from both our upstream and downstream collection sites. At the moment the population includes about 14 scarlet shiners, 3 striped shiners, 2 blackspotted topminnows (Fundulus olivaceus), 4 telescope shiners (Notropis telescopus) and one stoneroller (Campostoma oligolepis). All are young adults, maybe a year old. The topminnows really do stay at the surface for the most part, and the stoneroller is usually near the bottom. One thing I have to examine further is the presence of telescope shiners in this creek, even at the downstream site. That's something of a range extension, since they're usually more common in highland settings. They're pretty fish in an understated way.