It's Easy To Catch Telescope Shiner YOY At Estill Fork

We went out to a spot on Estill Fork first thing this morning to catch young-of-year telescope shiners for brain examination (for real). This spot is way up the Paint Rock valley in Jackson County, Alabama, maybe 3 km south of the Tennessee line. It was a good guess, we caught all the fish we needed within an hour with Andrew and Brittany doing some shallow wading wielding my superfine mesh kicknet. We caught fish in the size range 12 mm - 30 mm, brought back most of them alive, and sorted them three ways: about 5 I'm trying to keep alive in an aquarium just to observe them, about 7 were frozen so that we can run western blots with their brains to assay for the presence of NMDA receptors (learning and sex circuitry), and about 14 for dissecting and measuring the brain that were fixed in formaldehyde.

The above photo is the basin just below the lowhead bridge that crosses the stream, at what used to be a ford. Under normal stream flow this can be almost 2 meters deep, and has a surprisingly high diversity of fishes in it including gar. At the downstream end of this basin the stream forms a run/riffle section for several hundred meters that has more darters and northern studfish, in particular, than any equivalent stretch of stream I've seen.



Above is a shot of Brittany and Andrew at work scooping up telescopes from the schools moving along the edge of this basin. I took the shot into the sun low on the horizon, so it has an interesting "Mists of Avalon" look to it.


The photo above is of an upstream section that is usually about a half meter deep. The drought is beginning to kick in again around here, so the stream was very low today. The shallows were full of small northern studfish, telescopes, scarlet shiners, bluntnose minnows and darters. We brought home a small fantail darter that I have in a lab aquarium.