Just Thinking In The Heat

Preliminary observations of the telescope shiners we collected last Tuesday show that their gonadal tissues are much reduced compared even to July. When Loren showed me the first ovary she dissected out, I thought it was a testes; nope, they're really that reduced. And the testes are out-and-out difficult to find now. So I'm sure that the GSI values for August will be way down. But this is what happened with burrhead and silverstripe shiners from Borden Creek three years ago, so it's not really a surprise. We also collected the smallest telescope we've found yet, at 27 mm. Our seine is relatively coarse so there has been size selectivity all along. But now with that individual I think we caught a subadult who was born in 2006. One expansion of our current research would be to look for young of the year (YOY) fish and observe their growth rate. At the least, I think we'll try to catch some in September and see what we find. This assumes that I'm confident of species ID on 15 mm fish, or whatever exact size they are. We'll see...