Trips For The Week

I'm going out tomorrow with Allison from Alabama A&M, and Jennifer from UAH who's working with her, to scout possible habitat for slackwater darters in the Flint River of Madison County, Alabama. Their project of reviewing GIS images for remaining habitat preferred by the fish--easily flooded hardwood bottomland where the fish spawn during winter floods--has been disappearing with creeping development in the area. I think that Allison and her collaborators have identified some potential habitat, so we'll go out and see if slackwaters are there. We don't want to keep any fish, since they're Federally listed, but just see if they're present.

And on Friday we're doing a trip to Elmore County, Alabama, to look for stippled studfish at three historic sites near the Tallapoosa River. I think that Steven, Travis and Paul are going. Unfortunately we won't meet Joe Scanlan, since he's going to the annual convention of the American Killifish Association in Syracuse, NY. Two of these sites produced >10 stippleds in earlier collections, and one is described as having a bottom of sand and fine gravel, so I suspect we'll find stippleds. But we'll see.

I did an inventory of what stippled DNA extractions and amplifications we have. This week I realized that with a new PCR setup, of new Taq polymerase and dNTPs in particular, our PCR product looks much better. The latest run worked five for five. We may have to re-run some of our earlier work. But, at the moment, we have four amplified products from Cornhouse Creek site #2, one from Cornhouse Creek site #1, four from Hillabee Creek near Alexander City and one from upper Hillabee Creek. We also now have successful amplifcations from three southern studfish, three northern studfish, and a pretty shiner that we kept by mistake and decided to PCR as a form of control. So progress is made, and we can go on to run the 15 or so samples that still need to be run for a first time.