My Burrhead & Silverstripe Shiner Article Is Definitely In At Southeastern Naturalist

I talked to my editor, Todd, at Southeastern Naturalist on Friday and he's almost completely happy with my manuscript on the reproduction of burrhead and silverstripe shiners that we've been working on for the last six months. (These things always go slowly...) The only thing we still have to fix is my Figure 1, showing the relative fraction of egg cell developmental stages of the two species over the breeding season. Ideally this should be on one graph, with two side-by-side bars for each month. But strangely, Excel can't do this, so I'm trying to track down a colleague with Sigma Plot which is a more powerful software package. If I can't make the moves by the end of the week Todd will do it when he returns from field work in Mississippi. Hopefully the article will come out at the end of the year, although Todd couldn't say that for sure.

This coming Friday I'll be joining Nick Sharp and other State Lands employees on some new state property along Coon Gulf off of the Tennessee in Jackson County, AL. This land is supposed to be in surprisingly good shape with a clean stream running through it before emptying into the Tennessee. Their concern is to determine if hellbender salamanders are on the property, which would be cool since they're disappearing from streams across their range. I'll show up with some students to sample the creek for fish, and also to see if we can encounter any amphibians in the creek besides hellbenders. I'm curious to see if we find any flame chubs or blotchside logperch, among other uncommon fish species. Nick tells me that the unpaved road into this site is much better than the one at the Walls of Jericho, which I can well believe.

We've dissected the ovaries of all of the female telescope shiners from June and May, and we're well into the April fish. Soon we'll have to start counting and measure eggs, along with determining the maturation stage of each ovary. It'll be a ton'o data but well worth it.

I think we've signed the last papers for Rachel to complete her Master's degree. Her thesis on black darter reproduction is in good shape, and hopefully we can boil it down into a journal article. I'm still intrigued by the Sarcocystis coccidian parasites she found in the darters. It's something I'd like to go back to if some student is up for the field work and histological work. Volunteers?