Most Of The Scarlet Shiners Are Still Alive...

... after I added 11-KT suspended in ethanol to their tanks last Friday. I'd pulled out the filter pads in the hanging filter boxes so that the 11-KT wouldn't be removed too quickly. But, by Sunday when I came in, several of the tanks had clouded up and several of the young scarlet shiners were dead in a few tanks. I had to consolidate all of the surviving fish (8) exposed to 35 ng of 11-KT in one tank, and all of the surviving control fish (5) in another tank. Interestingly, the two groups of fish in tanks exposed to 15 ng of 11-KT (10) were fine, so they're still in two separate tanks with 5 fish each. If I try this again in the future I've got to get purer steroids not in ethanol so I won't take a chance on crashing the biological filtration in the tank. I guess even 2 ml of ethanol in a 10-gallon tank can have a bad effect; after all the years I've kept fish I've never added ethanol to a tank(!) so now I think I can offer free advice: don't do it! So my ideal experimental design is compromised, but I'll keep going to see what happens over time with the surviving fish.

We'll be going back to the Tallapoosa system next Friday. Joe Scanlan can meet us, and I hope to finally finish visiting sites in Tallapoosa County. Joe is bringing 6 stippled studfish captured in Sofkahatchee Creek in Elmore County, preserved in ethanol, to give me for DNA extraction. And of course we still have lots of lab work to do, but at least the PCRs are working better than before. And that's all you can hope for.