Plans For The Week

I went in to my lab yesterday to see how the fish we brought home alive were doing. There were a lot of casualties, but more than half are still alive. The problem is that almost all of the telescope shiners were kaput; several of the larger scarlet shiners were still alive, whose fresh brains we want to process tomorrow; most of the striped shiners were still alive, tough suckers that they are; and the 5 snubnose darters that we brought home were all alive. With the telescopes and scarlets we want to prepare brain sections for NMDA receptor measurement, which can only be done with freshly sacrificed brains. The striped shiners are purely for gut content analysis since they're the dominant shiner species in Estill Fork. And with the scarlets and darters, we want to examine them for gill flukes. Andrew and I realized that no Dactylogyrus gill flukes have been described for any darter species; maybe these flukes only parasitize cyprinids? Either way we want to see what we can find on the gill filaments of the darters.

So, with few or no telescopes tomorrow, I'm planning a return to Estill Fork in the next several days. This time we'll collect only telescope shiners, handle them much more gently and keep them in a slightly refrigerated bucket (an ice cube in a plastic bag), take them home and immediately do the brain dissections. I guess sabbatical leave is for this kind of mad-dog work schedule. And maybe we should do a few striped shiner brains, too, whilst we have them...