Telescope Shiners In Process

I met with Andrew, Valerie and Loren this afternoon for several hours to start work with the telescope shiners we collected last Saturday. Each fish is individually "named" with a month code (B for February, the second month), T (for telescope) and numbers (o1 - however many), so for instance a fish is BT03. Each fish is in its very own 24 ml glass screw-cap tube in 10% phosphate-buffered formaldehyde with its code in punch-tape stuck on the outside. My digital calipers have gone missing, so we settled for going up to the Bishop lab and weighing each fish on her good balance. The very biggest telescope was about 2 grams, many of them just under 1 g. We record the mass in grams to three decimal places after quickly rolling the fish in a paper towel to absorb excess formaldehyde. We'll get the standard length (SL) by next Friday, and probably eviscerate a few to see if there's any appreciable gonadal development.

Kris ran another PCR with some of our Fundulus heteroclitus DNA. At least two of the samples showed amplification bands on the gel, one from Boston Harbor and one from Chincoteague, VA. We'll run some more on Monday, trying some more Boston Harbor samples. So now we have six (maybe 8) successful amplifications in the last week, not bad for occasional work(!).