RIP John Bondhus

John Bondhus died this past Sunday, Aug. 20, from an infection he wasn't quite able to shake. John was the central organizer of the North American Native Fishes Association (NANFA) in 1972. He and a small group of other native fish enthusiasts worked to establish a group to advocate for native fishes and their enivoronments, and to support the responsible aquarium keeping of many of these fishes. NANFA has withstood many storms and stresses over the past 34 years. Today we have 480 members, and produce a high quality quarterly journal, American Currents. All of us in NANFA will miss John, who was always a quiet, rational voice especially at key moments.

In other, happier, news, an undergraduate has agreed to work with me and Amy, our departmental neurobiologist, on an interdisciplinary project to characterize certain features of brain cells and regions in scarlet shiners. This project will stain and section brain tissue with antibody stains to examine differences between male and female individuals in a key neurological pathway related to both learning and sexual differentiation. I've never worked on any kind of immunohistological project so much of this will be new to me. The project relates to what Jennifer is already working on, characterizing pigment intensity and testosterone levels in scarlet shiners. I never thought of making scarlet shiners a study animal, but they lend themselves to it in several ways. They're a common species, so we aren't destroying local communities, and they also have pronounced sexual dimorphism enabling the study of what shapes and guides the dimorphism. The beauty of it all is that we're linking cellular and molecular processes with sensory ecology. It should be fun!