Pombo Lost Re-Election, Mummichog DNA Analysis

An interesting outcome of yesterday's elections was that Representative Richard Pombo of California lost his bid for re-election. Pombo spent his time in Congress trying to gut the Endangered Species Act, which luckily never quite succeeded. The next Congress will be improved simply by not including this clown.

Various research projects are moving ahead in my lab. Enrique and Leigh have now removed the brains of 85 scarlet shiners, so we'll double our data set for brain mass vs. somatic mass. I still haven't processed that data though. Once they remove the last few brains from the remaining preserved fish, they'll move on to examining variation in the size of specific brain regions such as the telencephalon, optic tectum and cerebellum. In principle, larger, more dominant males should show enhanced size in one or more of these structures. But if I knew the answer it wouldn't be research, would it?

Kris has made a lot of progress massaging and lining up the cytochrome-b mtDNA sequences from the mummichogs. That work has been a lot harder than I'd thought it would be, although now we've completed the learning curve part of the project and the remaining sequence work goes faster. It appears that we'll have homologous sequences of roughly 700 base pairs from most if not all of the 33 fish for which we apparently have sequences. The bad news is that the worst of these sequences is the single sequence I have from Martha's Vineyard. Without that we still have 32 fish from 6 locations, Boston south to Charleston, SC. After working on this project off and on for 11 years I'm excited at the prospect of being able to present a phylogeny based on this gene.