The Telescope Manuscript Is Back In Play

I mailed off the revised telescope shiner manuscript to the editor at American Midland Naturalist today. It's a lot better than it was, and now includes color photos of our four defined developmental stages for both oocytes and ovaries. I hope they like it.

Andrew is on a roll getting gill flukes off of scarlet shiners, and getting good photos of them. We're now pretty confident that what we're seeing is an undescribed species based on both haptor (hooks) arrangement and shape, and also the shape of the reproductive apparatus. Now all we have to do is draw them. But first we'll send off some photos to Don Cloutman and get his opinion before we get carried away. The logical next step from this would be to look at other Lythrurus species and see what kind of flukes they have. But that's a job for another day.

I confirmed today that we still have reasonable samples of our purified DNA extracts from stippled studfish. The question is whether it's really good stuff, or are we running around in hopeless circles trying to get it sequenced. I don't think we're retarded but it's vexing reconstructing our work on this project. I'd love to hear from someone who has a good DNA sequencing operation but they seem to be hard to find of late.