Aquarium Update, And How Easy It Is To Dissect Previously Frozen Shiner Brain?

The 55-gal. tank seems to be going well. Both the southern studfish and the o-spots recognize defrosted frozen brine shrimp as food, and they seem to be considering the palatibility of TetraMin flake. The two surviving whitetail shiners seem to be happy in a 10-gal. of their own, facing into the current and picking out flake food; like most shiners they seem immediately to recognize flake as food.

We're meeting tomorrow afternoon to coordinate our actions in examining the scarlet and telescope shiners we've collected lately. They're mostly frozen to preserve the NMDA receptor proteins in the brain. So, we'll have to defrost them, weigh and measure them, and remove the brain to be stored at -80 deg. C until we can run the brain in a western blot. The trick is to set up a whole bunch of western blots at the same time so that they can be interpreted on the same basis, i.e. westerns are more like reading tea leaves than I like to think about (no, really!). So we'll be assaying the levels of these sex & learning pathways in the two species, and comparing young of the year to adults (we hope). The only tricky thing might be ID'ing male vs. female telescope shiners. There's little sexual dimorphism, so it usually requires gonadal dissection to determine sex. This is relatively easy in formaldehyde-fixed specimens, but defrosted unfixed individuals might be somewhat mushy. We'll see.

And everyone's planning to vote, I hope? You know that you really should vote like me. Ask and I'll tell you!