Getting More Work Started On Scarlet Shiners

This week I picked up another graduate student to work on characterizing scarlet shiner brain structure. Enrique had a bad experience in another research lab on campus, and since I know him from undergraduate classes I agreed to take him in on my work. For his thesis project he'll work on our effort to characterize the nucleus olfactoretinalis (NOR) of scarlet shiners, a key region of fish brains for coordinating sexual development and differentiation. This will involve some fairly slick histological preparations and staining with antibodies, but I think we can do it. Leigh is also working on this, so between the two of them something should come out soon. One relatively easy study is the size of fish brains relatively to body size. Many of the scarlet shiners that Christian has used in her parasite study can be used for this, since they're tagged with ID information in a gallon pickle jar of formaldehyde with only the right gill arch removed. I'm not sure I've ever seen such an allometric study of shiner brains, hopefully we'll produce some interesting data (how could we not?).

Today I showed a video to my Vertebrate Reproduction class from the Nature series, The Nature of Sex. It involved all sorts of animal sex, including a few fish scenes such as amorous jaw fish avoiding ambushes by scorpion fish. It's not Alabama, but it was fun. I warned this class we'd talk about sex, sex and sex; the good news is that they all seem to like it.