Wednesday, December 10, 2008

I Just Sacrificed The 11-KT Scarlet Shiners

Yeah, today's the day. I stopped the grow-out experiment I started on May 30 with three treatments of young-of-the-year scarlet shiners: one group exposed to 35 ng of 11-ketotestosterone in 38 liters of water, one group exposed to 15 ng of 11-KT in 38 liters of water and one control group (no exposure to 11-KT). The experiment started with 8 or 9 individuals in each treatment, in two separate aquariums for each treatment. Today I ended up with 3 individuals in the 35 ng treatment, 5 in the 15 ng treatment, and 3 controls. It's not a statistically powerful test, but I hope it's an informative pilot project. It seems that individuals from the two 11-KT treatments grew bigger (I haven't measured them yet). What we're really interested in is whether there will be differences in brain size, and in the size of specific brain regions. In principle the ones exposed to 11-KT should be more "male"-like, which means larger size, more vivid color and a larger brain. We'll see...

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