A Last Push On Scarlet Shiner Brains

I went out this afternoon with Enrique and Rebecca to catch a final 10 scarlet shiners. We needed fresh brains of nonreproductive females, which at this time of year is most of them. Enrique and Rebecca are running a last round of Western blots to determine NMDA receptor concentrations in the three major brain areas. They're also running the same brain parts from male and female telescope shiners for comparison. The telescopes have a low level of sexual dimorphism while the scarlets have pronounced sexual dimorphism. Our hypothesis is that the telescope shiners should show less of a difference between males and females, that is, the two sexes should have similar levels of NMDA receptors. It would also be fun to check out 11-ketotestosterone levels in the telescopes, but we'll have to let that slide for now. If this works, Enrique's thesis work is finished and all he has to do is write it up and defend.

I gotta say you know we're tough, the temperature this afternoon was 39 deg. C, or 103 F. We all sweated, but that's what you have to do for real biology.