Work In Progress: The First Two Paragraphs Of My Flame Chub Article

I've finally found what I think is the right journal for submission of my flame chub survey work: Endangered Species Research. So I've started to write an article today. Below is my work of the last hour or so writing the Introduction; I'm going home, maybe to work on more this evening or tomorrow. It's always easier for me to write this kind of stuff after a manuscript has started, everything else can then fall in to place. So I've started!

INTRODUCTION

The status of many freshwater fish species in the species-rich southeastern United States is surprisingly poorly known. Attempts to characterize the status of some rare river species such as the snail darter, Percina tanasi or the Alabama sturgeon, Scaphirhyncus suttkusi, have sparked political controversy and drawn media attention even as exploratory field work goes on for years. Both of these species have suffered from the alteration of river habitat by dam construction.

Vulnerable fish species found in smaller streams in the same region have not received the same level of attention from either the popular media or government agencies. One example is the Alabama Pygmy Sunfish, Elassoma alabamae, considered extinct for 35 years after several springs were drowned in 1938 by Pickwick Pool on the Tennessee River until another isolated spring population was discovered (Boschung & Mayden, 1999). Another example is the federally Threatened slackwater darter, Etheostoma boschungi, with now disjunct populations in two stream systems as more and more of their habitat is lost to changing land use (McGregor & Shepard, 1995; Boschung & Mayden, 1999).