Paper Publishing Prospects

I heard from the Editor at the Journal of Fish Biology last week. They declined our black darters paper on the grounds that it's too local (relative to England, sure...) and uses standard histological techniques. The latter I'd quibble with since we developed a method for doing histology with very small fish, but OK. At least they didn't say the paper sucks. So we're on to Plan B -- I've already started to reformat it for Southeastern Naturalist. SE Nat is a good regional journal, and many of the readers know what a darter is in the first place. So it's not such a loss to work on publishing work for an audience more likely to appreciate it.

The first priority, though, is to get out our scarlet shiners brains paper to NeuroReport. I just now finished some heavy grooming of the figures for it. Once I pump up the figure captions it should be just about ready to upload to the Editor in the next several days. It's turned out to be a good paper after several rounds of rewrites. We're sticking with the title, "Sexual Dimorphism in a Teleost Central Nervous System: Are Dominant Males Smarter?"

And I await a decision on the telescope shiners paper from American Midland Naturalist.

Here's a picture of Estill Fork on May 29. The emergent grasses have started to grow in a big way, which of course is where all of the fish hide.