Omigod, I Have To Move My Fish Collection Soon!

Our department is moving to the new science building on campus soon. This is of course a major logistical nightmare for everyone involved. For me, besides figuring out how to move our 50 teaching microscopes without smashing them up (short answer: box them and transport them myself) I have to move my ~450 jars of preserved fish, variously in ethanol and 10% phosphate buffered formaldehyde, and several buckets of preserved mussels from the Tennessee River. I moved about 150 jars of pickled fish from Boston 8 years ago without a problem so this shouldn't be that bad. But I'm stressing already... I hope to move them sometime in November. And then there's all of my books (I feel like a biblioklept sometimes), plus all of the fossils in the Vertebrate Zoology lab, and several large aquaria. Good thing that I have a truck with a functional tailgate.

On a less stressed note, we've made some progress figuring out how to count and characterize telescope shiner eggs in the .jpg images we've created after shredding ovaries. The big question is how to separate eggs that are Late Mature from those that are Mature, developmentally. There's not always a large size difference. One characteristic we've noticed is that many of these developing eggs are reddish-brown, with marbled layers of yellow. The reddish-brown represents oil droplets and concentrated protein deposition, along with the yellow yolk, all of which are more pronounced as the egg is nearly ready to be released and fertilized. This is something different from what I've encountered with other shiner eggs, or seen mentioned in journal articles. So at least two of the students working with me are clear on this point, and I think one of the other two is also. I wanted to do this project right rather than fast, but we're picking up the speed now.

And I still have to do two field trips to look for flame chubs in 'bama, one trip to Anniston, AL, and one to Russellville in Franklin County. I hope to do one of these trips in two weeks, at least.