New Aquarium Fish, Jennifer's 11-KT Project, Telescope Shiner Brains

I've been meaning to collect some whitetail shiners, Cyprinella galactura all summer but never had a chance to visit a regional stream with them. So I'm receiving 6 freebies from Drewish on the NANFA Forum that he collected in SW Virginia. They're a fairly large, active species that I last saw at Coon Creek last summer. I hope they'll do well in the currently empty 55-gal. tank in my lab. I think they're another one of these fairly widespread but relatively poorly known species.

The abstract for Jennifer's presentation to the SFC meeting in Chattanooga is about ready after some back and forth. She's performed new analyses on our data, which basically show that elevated levels of the androgen 11-KT in alpha males has very pronounced effects: they're bigger, more colorful (red!), have larger testes than males with low levels of 11-KT and females. These large males have an average blood concentration of 11-KT of 39 picograms/microliter compared to non-alpha males with 1.9 and females with 0.5 pg/ul. I've been re-reading some of the literature on males in other fish species with elevated 11-KT, and usually these average levels in alpha males don't exceed 20 pg/ul. So our scarlets are total steroid monsters; some individuals had over 100. Yow!

On a related front, Brittany, Andrew and Alexandra are making headway measuring brain volume of our June telescope shiners. Each is doing a complete set of measurements, and we'll either average all the measurements if they seem comparable or just use one person's measurements. So far it looks like they're doing it about the same, which is good for quality control.