Scarlets & Brains

Jennifer has decided that she'd like to do a talk at the SFC meeting rather than a poster, so that's fine with me. Her thesis defense was well done so I'm sure it can be boiled down to a 15 minute talk.

We're back in gear on the telescope shiners brain project. Brittany has removed the brains of 10 males and 10 females from our June collection at Hurricane Creek. This week we'll begin to photograph them so we can make digital measurements of specific areas for volume calculations, before weighing them and going on to May fish for the same treatment. To extend the project, we're going to Hurricane Creek (below the Walls of Jericho tract) next Saturday to look for young of the year telescopes for brain measurements. It's no guarantee that we'll find them, of course, but if we even just find some adults that will be good for the purposes of running Western blots of their brains to assay for NMDA receptors. Brittany, James and Alexandria all blanched at the thought of dissecting out the brain of a 20 mm fish. As always, we'll see...