Moving Preserved Fish Means Putting Them Away, Too

As of yesterday I've finally moved the last of the semi-abandoned preserved fish collection from our old building to the Shelby Center. Part of this collection is numbered and inventoried, which I've moved in to the Zoology lab. The other, more recent part is based on relatively recent collections mostly in north Alabama, jars with juvenile largemouth bass, sunfishes, or local stream fishes. These jars are now in a drawer in my lab. I've found some bizarrely mis-identified lots, like "Rough Shiners" from the Paint Rock river that are really telescope shiners; my retired colleague was hazy on both shiners and darters since he wasn't really an ichthyologist. One small jar contained three smallish flame chubs from "Flint River 1977" that were most dried out. I added 70% EtOH to that jar, hopefully saving them for possible DNA extraction. I'll replace the 70% with 95% in the next month or so.

I also found several excellent shark skeletons in jars that will be good for the Vertebrate Zoology class. Other fun finds include hagfish, lampreys, various flatfish like tongue fish and hogchokers, and oddities like cusk eels, moray eels and boxfish. Many of these still have to be put away in the Vert Zoo lab but I also brought over a solid steel cabinet with doors that I'd used for my fish collection. It adds a lot of useful space for storage.