Telescope Shiners Article Introduction

Since I've been having dreams about writing a journal article on our research project with telescope shiners, I finally sat down several times over the last several days and hammered out an Introduction for such an article. This is the hardest part of a journal article, since you have to concisely state the context and reason for your work preferably in no more than three paragraphs. One of my colleagues says that for him, the introduction takes 50% of his effort on a paper. I might go with more like 35% for me, but that's still significant. Banging out the materials & methods, and results, is almost easy, and then there's another big effort necessary to wrap it all up in a discussion.

So here it is, a work in progress. I'll almost certainly tweak it before submission but I want to put it into play. If nothing else, I'll see and read it again and maybe realize that I could state it better. I hope to submit this to the journal American Midland Naturalist.

Begin:

Cyprinid stream fishes of temperate North America typically spawn in the spring to allow larvae to grow enough to survive their first winter. The details of each species’ reproductive schedule and effort vary as an important part of its ecological niche. With the high species diversity of cyprinid stream fishes in the southeastern United States there are many variations on the theme of vernal spawning and thus in the ecological niches of these species.

One such cyprinid is Notropis telescopus Cope (telescope shiner), found in the Cumberland and Tennessee river drainages east of the Mississippi River and the White and Arkansas drainages in the Ozarks west of the Mississippi. N. telescopus is a common inhabitant of runs and flowing pools over sand and gravel in creeks and small rivers with clear water. Etnier and Starnes (1993) report observations of the species spawning in Tennessee from mid-April through mid-June.

The purpose of this study is to determine the schedule of reproduction (sensu Heins and Rabito 1986) of N. telescopus by examining gonadal condition over the course of a possible breeding season, February through August. No previous study has addressed this issue. Both males and females in the genus Notropis and closely related genera are known to be multiple spawners, with females producing more eggs than are found in the ovary at any one time (Dahle 2001, Heins and Clemmer 1976, Stallsmith et al. 2007).