Shiner Photography Technique Development

I worked with Jennifer yesterday for the first time on photographing scarlet shiners for her project. Our goal is to be able to quantify coverage and intensity of body and fin color in breeding condition males. I read of one study with male guppies in which a guppy was anesthetized with MS-222 and photographed with ASA-100 slide film under tungsten light. The resulting slide would be projected on to paper taped to a wall, the fish's body would be outlined, and color spots of interest would be drawn in, allowing coverage to be calculated. We're working with Jennifer's digital camera, trying to do a similar analysis with a software package. So, yesterday we euthanized a beautiful male scarlet with MS-222, and set him up on an old photo light table with a camera attachment that I have. We figured out the best presentation was to put the male out on brown corrugated cardboard, with fins held in display with insect pins. Light was provided in a dark room from wall bouncing of light from the four floodlights on the arms of the photo table. This allowed images to be made at 1/6 of a second, at F 3.2, with a minimum of glare on the fish. My wife Ruth is an artist, and her critique of this approach is that the cardboard will add a yellow tinge to the image; she says we should use a neutral gray background for minimum alteration of color. We'll try that in the near future. But with the brown cardboard we got some really nice photos with which we can at least begin analysis. If you do a Google search, few good images of scarlet shiners come up; I think we'll post one soon for everyone's perusal.

The bad news yesterday was that when I approached my aquarium room door in the morning I could smell very dead fish. Sure enough, all of the fish that we collected in Limestone Creek on Monday were dead, apparently from a crashed aquarium (sudden bad water quality). They were so dead that I had to throw away all 12 of them rather than try to save them for gill examination. I think the fact that the fish were collected in very turbid conditions, and some of that water was put in the tank, contributed to the crash. Luckily all the fish from Swan Creek were alive, including some primo alpha male scarlet shiners and some lunker striped shiners. I'm replacing the 10 gallon tank that crashed with a slate-bottom 20 gallon I just acquired from another lab, so a bigger tank size should help prevent future crashes. It's mildly embarassing to have this crash, I haven't had a tank do that in years.

Also, I submitted the paper on burrhead and silverstripe shiners to Ecology of Freshwater Fish yesterday. They have an elaborate system for online submission, as is typical of journals published by Blackwell Scientific. It took me less than an hour, including registering for an account before the actual submission. Our manuscript is number 96 for the year, an interesting thought. I'm hoping for both a fast and affirmative decision from the editors; I assume that David Heins from Tulane will be the editor handling our manuscript since he's done work similar to ours.