Thursday, May 01, 2008

What Concentration Of 11-KT Would YOU Expose Your Scarlet Shiners To?

I'm currently in possession of 20 vials each containing 10 ng of 11-ketotestosterone suspended in 1 ml of ethanol. The point is to expose some juvenile scarlet shiners I have in 10-gallon tanks to different levels of 11-KT, and see how it affects their brain growth over the next 6-12 months. 10 ng is a vanishingly small amount of anything, even a potent androgen steroid. I ran the calculations, and figure that if I add 6 vials to each of two 10-gallon tanks, the resulting concentration of 11-KT will be 5.2 x 10(-11) M; a second treatment, of two vials per tank, results in 1.7 x 10(-11) M, and two tanks would receive no 11-KT. The theory is that the 11-KT will be taken up across the gills, and thus be a large increase in existing levels of circulating 11-KT. Will this work? We have to cogitate more on this...

James extracted DNA from representative samples of the fish we collected last Saturday, and apparently got good pellets from all of them. We're building a believable library of stippled studfish DNA, hopefully at least most of it will produce good sequences for comparison. A pattern of population is beginning to form in my mind, of separate creeks connected by the Tallapoosa River. Will these populations be genetically distinct, or is there just one somewhat scattered population in this species? I'll leave you with that tease.

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