Ask Me About Black Darter Reproduction!

I finally had a chance to sit down this afternoon and do work on our black darter manuscript, boiling down Rachel's thesis. It's starting to look & read like a journal-ready article. Without a title page or references it's 32 pages. Partially this is because I've included a bunch of figures of microscopic images of darter testes and ovaries in various states, to illustrate that the histological approaches Rachel used give unusually clear views of the size and arrangement of individual gonads. The work tracks and compares two populations of darters from January - April, and finds clear differences between them in length and weight, timing of gonadal maturation, and number of ripe eggs available for a clutch of eggs. The population from a scuzzy-looking urban creek was bigger with more eggs, but the population from a relatively clean, intact rural creek exhibited seasonal maturation earlier. So it's a lot of information with a lot of statistical treatment to weave together. My current plan is to submit it to one of my favorite journals, Southeastern Naturalist. It's a big article for them, but I plan on paring it down some before submission.