Preliminary Oocyte Size Data For Telescope Shiners

I've had a (small) chance to work through the notebooks kept by my students working on the telescope shiner reproductive biology project. We have at least two observer's data on all of the female telescopes from April and May of last year. I've gone through for six of the May fish and pulled out the most representative averages of two of these observers for each fish as a way to standardize everyone's slightly different views. These preliminary data show that these six fish averaged 289 maturing oocytes in their ovaries (by maturing, we mean that they show evidence of vitellogenesis and begin to look like "eggs"). The oocyte diameter size averages broke down as follows for the four maturation stages we use: early maturing, 479 micrometers; late maturing, 687 micrometers; mature, 1215 micrometers; ripe, 1410 micrometers. I was happy to see a clear pattern of steadily increasing size. There's still plenty more work to do on this project...

My article has appeared in the new issue of Southeastern Naturalist. The title is "Observations on the Reproductive Biology of Two Notropis Shiner Species", 2007, Vol. 6, pages 693-704, by Bruce Stallsmith, Kevin Butler, Amy Woodall, and Bob Muller. I don't have a .pdf yet otherwise I would offer to send it to anyone who's interested in just what the hell burrhead and silverstripe shiners do for reproductive output. I realize that I started work on that project almost exactly four years ago, so that's a typical turnaround time for carrying out research and getting it into a peer-reviewed journal. I'm happy to see it out, it's definitely an ego boost. Hooray!