Trip To Estill Fork, And New Fish

I've come into more fish for the lab aquariums this past week. Stan Sung, in town for a series of collecting trips with others, gave me 5 orangespot sunfish he collected in Colorado. I also received 7 whitetail shiners from Drewish in Virginia in the mail. I put all of them in the 55 on Tuesday, when they all arrived separately. The o-spots are subadults, about 2 inches long, and the whitetails were on average slightly smaller. When I came in on Wednesday, one of the o-spots had a tail sticking out of its mouth; the two largest o-spots had each eaten one of the smaller whitetails. Great... I had to move the whitetails to a 10 gal. tank, and three of them died from the accumulated stress by Saturday. The remaining two kind of looked OK yesterday and I hope to find them alive tomorrow when I go in. But the o-spots look great!

There are now 5 southern studfish, Fundulus stellifer, in the 55-gal. with the o-spots. Stan and crew went to Collinsville, AL, on Thursday to look for southern studfish and rainbow shiners at my suggestion. They found both and gave me five of the studfish, all young adults (and all bigger than the o-spots). They're good aquarium fish with one caveat: they're the most athletic fish I know of and will try to jump out of anything you put them in. The 55-gal. is well covered and I hope to keep them in it.

Stan and all joined us on Saturday for a trip to Estill Fork. We wanted a variety of telescope and scarlet shiners, adult and YOY, for population and brain studies, and they were interested in going to a new, interesting stream. A good time was had by all... we caught bunches of fish for research on a beautiful sunny day. The stream was up since it rained late in the week. We also met a local guy who studied with Prof. Jandebur (I misspelled his name...) who used to be at Athens State until about 10 years ago, who carried out fish research. He was fun to talk to and we hope to meet him again at the stream in the future. He also used to be a member of the Methodist Church near this site, which is interesting in its own right. One irony is that we netted an obvious Cyprinella species which I thought was a blacktail shiner without thinking. Today I realized that it was an adult whitetail shiner, at least now I really know they're in Estill Fork for future purposes.

Below is a picture of two of Stan's group (Stan second from left), and also Brittany and Jennifer who work with me as we prepared to leave.