A Nice Trip Collecting Scarlet Shiners

I went out to Limestone Creek this morning with Jennifer and Cedona. We were interested in collecting about 10 male scarlet shiners, both alpha and sub-dominant males. Jennifer has collected blood from a good number of females already but was lacking sub-dominant males, especially. We were out and back in under two hours. The creek is very low because of our drought, and we're getting better at targeting high likelihood net positions. Jennifer spent the afternoon bleeding the fish, getting as much as 70 microliters of blood per fish. She hopes to run ELISA tests on the blood samples for 11-ketotestosterone by the end of the month. If it all works she's well on track to finish her Master's degree by next summer, pretty good work in our department.

Speaking of which, Rachel defended her thesis last Friday. Her work was on reproductive development in black darters in two local creeks using both histological preparations and counting eggs and egg size. It was a very impressive piece of work. She prepared 3000 stained histological slides, of which 300 were informative. It took 17 months from start to finish. Her thesis edits are almost finished, and then we can think about boiling it down to a journal article. Our first thought is to submit it to American Midland Naturalist.

Tomorrow we're going out to Hurricane Creek at the Walls of Jericho for our June collection of telescope shiners. It'll be the first trip for three of the students now on the project. I'm sure water will be low there too.