Maybe My Last Flame Chub Trip This Saturday

I hope to get out this Saturday to visit two creeks in Russellville, AL, that have been reported to have flame chubs. Once this trip is done I'll have visited 53 historic flame chub sites, and I'll finish writing my article once and for all. With the Choccolocco Creek trip, the current tally is finding flame chubs at 18 of 51 historic sites.

I gave a guest lecture on Monday to a physics class on campus, Frontiers In Science. The class format is to present different researchers from around UAH who discuss their research work. My presentation was very different, talking about running around the northern tier of Alabama looking for flame chubs. A typical talk might be on optics research, or some flavor of physical chemistry. I think it went well, no one fell asleep and they had intelligent questions at the end. None of them had ever encountered a minnow like a flame chub, I'm sure, much less considered where one might find a specific minnow and know that it's vulnerable to extinction. It's fun not to preach to the converted.

My big labor over the weekend was to sift through what's left of the teaching material for our Invertebrate Zoology class that hasn't been offered for 10 years. More than half of the preserved specimens are either messed up, or unlabeled. But I did take two wooden slide tray cases full of excellent prepared slides, and ten slide boxes with identical slide collections designed to be used by a student over a semester. It took eight medium-sized cardboard boxes to hold all the material I salvaged. I can't bring myself to abandon good material when we move in the next 2 months. My goal is to someday teach a two semester sequence, Invertebrate Zoology and Vertebrate Zoology. Our department is so short-handed I know it won't happen anytime soon. But, as usual, I'm attracted by what's right and I'll get hung up trying to make it happen without stepping on too many toes. And to think that I'm a pedigreed Environmental Scientist rather than a Zoologist...