On To Flagler County, Florida, In May

I realized that my first choice for a site to collect longnose killifish in Texas, the Port Bolivar peninsula on the east side of Galveston Bay, was ground zero for Hurricane Ike last summer. So rather than go there this May, Ruth and I will head for Flagler County, Florida. This is the boundary between what's usually recognized as a northern species, Fundulus majalis (striped killifish), and the southern species, Fundulus similis (longnose killifish). It's also the ecotone (boundary) between Spartina salt marshes typical of the northern Atlantic coast and the mangrove swamps typical of the southern Atlantic coast. So, I'd like to collect fish from the northern edge of Flagler County and the southern edge. I finally read the 1995 paper by Charles Duggins et al. in the journal Heredity entitled, "Analysis of a hybrid zone in Fundulus majalis in a northeastern Florida ecotone." They used protein electrophoresis to examine genetic differentiation between northern and southern populations of these species, from South Carolina down around to the Florida panhandle. Their conclusion was that there's really one species present, with two distinct populations with easy gene flow at the ecotone in Flagler County. That's been my working hypothesis that these two species are really a long cline of distinct populations along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from New Hampshire down to Tampico, Mexico. My expectation is that once I get all of my mitochondrial DNA sequences done from sites within this range, the data would reflect what Duggins et al. found using protein electrophoresis. Other work has shown statistically significant morphological differences between the two currently recognized species (and I feel stupid because I can't remember the citation!).

On a different note, we made a terrible mistake in our garden this week. We got a truckload of composted horse poop from a farm in Tennessee and put most of it on our garden. Now we have a scary ant infestation, likely fire ants. So tomorrow we'll spend the day digging out the top 6-12 inches that we just put in to physically remove the ants and hopefully avoid using heavy chemicals. The poop was free, and worth every penny apparently.