Fish Brains, Gut Contents, Gill Flukes, We Have Them All

This week has gone by like a blur. We returned to Estill Fork on Tuesday and easily caught about 10 more each telescope and scarlet shiners, and that afternoon removed fresh brains, mashed them up in a lysis buffer, and froze them in the -80 freezer. Someone neglected to advise us that it would be better to have included protease inhibitor with the brains, but because we froze them immediately it shouldn't matter and the NMDA protein we're interested in is probably OK.

We've been in contact with Cloutman from Bemidji State University about his work with Dactylogyrus gill flukes on the shiners. I think he's in shock that someone else is interested in these flukes, and he's given us some good advice for which I'm grateful. Andrew and the Special Topics students (especially Selina and Alan) have worked on looking for more flukes in some preserved scarlet shiners, since there's a good chance they're an undescribed species. It's a dicey kind of work, looking for a small well-defined object in the midst of feathery gill filaments. The flukes we've found in the telescope shiners are almost certainly D. spatulus, which has been found in several local shiners including the striped shiners. And Andrew just informed me that he's found small, yolky eggs in the gut of a male telescope shiner we collected in January. They're <1 mm in diameter, so my initial guess is that they're snail eggs. But we'll see.