Grant Proposal Submission To Birmingham Audubon

I'm still moving to our new building, and unpacking all that stuff to set up my own lab, the intro biology teaching labs, and the zoology teaching lab. Luckily Kris is helping with the intro lab, and Jennifer with the zoology lab, so I think it's under control. Later this afternoon I hope to move over the first round of my aquariums and set up one or two in my lab. With all of the times I've done this in my life you'd think it was easy. It should be. If nothing else, I need two or three tanks to hold the fish I currently have, mostly scarlet shiners.

My big research achievement of the week was to submit a grant proposal to an environmental research fund run by the Birmingham Audubon. I've asked them for $2000 to support a research project on the stippled studfish, Fundulus bifax. Roughly half of this would support just driving back and forth to the Tallapoosa River system in east Alabama, and half of it would be for doing genetics work in the lab. I want to visit historic collection sites to see if the fish is still present, and also to collect several individuals from each site for DNA extraction. I hope to be able to amplify and sequence the cytochrome-b gene from mitochondrial DNA, to compare different F. bifax populations to each other and also to the species' closest relatives, F. catenatus and F. stellifer. Hopefully the reviewers will be favorably impressed by research on a species that's now only found in Alabama, since it hasn't been found in the Georgia section of the Tallapoosa system for ten years or more.