Things Are Slow At The Moment, But Not For Long

Now that summer school is over, various students working on projects with me have scattered until school starts again on Aug. 23. But I think we'll get out this Friday to collect more striped and scarlet shiners in Limestone and Swan Creeks. Jennifer's foot is still fugazi but I think we can do something anyway.

I've also swung a deal with a graduate student whose focus is bioinformatics. He needs support this fall, so he's agreed to teach three lab sections for our Biology 1 class. He has experience teaching Organic Chemistry labs, so this should be easy (I hope!). As he wraps up his work here he only needs one more formal class. But in order to teach as a fully supported Teaching Assistant he has to be registered full time. So, I'm setting up a Special Topics class for him to take and the project will be making sense out of my set of DNA data from Fundulus heteroclitus, F. similis and F. majalis. I've had these mitcohondrial cytochrome-b sequences since last December but haven't been able to get at them. The heteroclitus data are from populations along the Atlantic coast from Boston Harbor in the north, to Nantucket, and down to Charleston, South Carolina. My question is whether the Nantucket population shows any genetic differentiation from other populations after almost 8,000 years of being isolated by rising sea level. I've been working on this since 1996, so I'm not in a blistering hurry. The other sequences, of similis and majalis, are for assaying the genetic similarities of these two very similar species of coastal killifish. I have access to sequence data from majalis I collected in Boston Harbor, Nantucket and Charleston, SC, and I've collected similis along the Florida and Alabama Gulf coasts. Early results with few localities (Boston, MA vs. Dauphin Island, AL) showed interesting differences. I hope it takes less than another ten years to get more information.

Here's a strangely informative photo of F. similis. The fish are pretty much black and white in life. You can see, I hope, why they're variously called the longnose killifish or the tiger minnow.

Below is a mummichog, F. heteroclitus, with silly caption. I've always been fascinated by this species which is overwhelmingly common in Atlantic coast saltmarshes from Newfoundland as far south as north Florida.