Everything's In Motion, In A Good Way

Jennifer started her ELISA run for scarlet shiner 11-ketotestosterone (11-KT) this afternoon. This is a big run, setting up more than 170 small tubes to incubate overnight. She's running triplicates of a bunch of shiner blood samples, male and female, and also standards of 11-KT and both positive and negative controls. By 10 tomorrow morning they'll be ready to be scanned and read in a spectrophotometer to determine concentrations of 11-KT. If it works, much of her thesis research is done; I don't want to think about what happens if it doesn't. One would assume that the males will have higher 11-KT levels than the females. I'll tell you what happens.

We started to count and measure telescope shiner eggs today on the other big project. We've photographed all of the ovaries we have from February on. Only 5 of the February ovaries were large enough to be worth photographing the same way we've done with ovaries from later in the season. The first three ovaries to be counted and measured were all from March. All of the oocytes were at a fairly early stage of development I would describe as early exogenous vitellogenesis. The egg counts ranged from 229 to 446 per fish. Measurements of the diameters of five random eggs from each fish were pretty tightly clustered at 0.7 mm. It's tedious work but yields interesting data (I kept telling that to Stephanie and Nicole who did the counts and measurements).

I heard from Nick Sharp today, who started his new job in Montgomery. He says that he drove the road into the Walls of Jericho last week and it was all clear. Hopefully that will be the status next Tuesday for our next trip.