Skunked By High, Fast Water

Yesterday I was able to convince James & Alexandra to join me for a quick scarlet shiner collecting trip to lower Limestone Creek about 12:30. The challenge was a severe tornadic system approaching... but I hoped we could get there, collect a dozen or so scarlets, and flee for cover back to UAH. When we got there I immediately realized we were out of luck. The creek was a good foot or more higher than when we were last there in January or early February when I thought the water was high, and the water was whipping through. With those conditions we weren't going to make a quick collection, and I didn't want to hang around in dangerous water with approaching severe thunderstorms. So we cut and ran. Watching the storm on weather radar from the safety of my office, one of the most intense centers of that storm went right over that creek site about 90 minutes later and then hit us at UAH. We didn't get hail, but a friend near campus had golfball sized hail hit her house. Oh well, maybe next Wednesday? The weather gets better next week.

Alexandra and Taito, working with Ernie in the Bishop lab, ran a test Western blot of homogenized shiner brains this week. It came out surprisingly well, with mostly well-defined bands. We didn't have a good protein size standard running with it, but it augurs well for future Westerns to compare NMDAR levels in various fish. The one tech fix we'll do is to use monoclonal rather than polyclonal antibodies for even sharper resolution of molecular weights of brain proteins. Alexandra is all excited to do more of that over the summer; sounds good to me. The whole point of this will be to compare brain functions between sexually dimorphic scarlet shiners, and much less dimorphic telescope shiners. It should be fun!