It's Good, It's Bad, It's Happening

The Good: We spent Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday running western blots on the brains of 10 telescope shiners, 9 scarlet shiners and 1 tennessee shiner that we collected a few weeks back. We're trying to quantify the presence of the major subunit of the protein NMDA, which helps to form pores in neuronal membranes enabling learning and sexual activity. The blots came out great, with sharply defined bands. I don't have the complete rundown yet, but we found a strong correlation between NDMA and GSI in female telescopes, and the 3 males in the sample all had higher values than the females. The tennessee shiner male, which was bright orange when we captured him, had a very high number for NMDA, too, which would be consistent with our expectations for breeding condition males. The tennessees are in the subgenus Hydrophlox, with most of the species showing sharp sexual dimorphism in spawning coloration and behavior. I've wanted to extend our work to this subgenus because they should all show this phenotypic plasticity in the brain. And, one of the species in the subgenus, the rough shiner, doesn't show pronounced sexual dimorphism which would be an interesting comparison phylogenetically.

The bad new is that the journal NeuroReport slammed our submitted manuscript on brain size and plasticity in scarlet shiners. It's the second nastiest review I've seen. I was taken aback by some of the things the reviewer said, to the point where I doubt that he read the entire manuscript or maybe isn't competent in English. Yeah, I know, that's what they all say, but it's some wild stuff. When the dust settles I may post some of the more lurid comments. We're all in shock, since this is by far the worst review she's ever received in her career. I think we suffer from trying to connect neuroscience with evolutionary ecology, this could be a hard sell. We may beg them to be allowed to resubmit, we'll see.

Also in the good news department, we've found and isolated Dactylogyrus gill flukes from scarlet shiners. No one has ever described fluke species from scarlets, and these flukes are distinctly different from others we've seen on telescope and striped shiners, so we probably have an undescribed species to write up at some point.