A Day At A Tennessee Creek, And Gill Flukes!

I've been distracted the past week by the beginning of school and general running around. But now I'm focused enough for a post. I spent last Saturday at 48 Creek outside of Waynesboro, TN. Some other NANFA people were supposed to meet there as part of a fish weekend, but they stayed at their base camp and we missed each other because I foolishly didn't have their cell numbers, and they had written mine down wrong. It wasn't a total loss though, I used the 12 foot seine as a 4 foot seine by rolling it up and pushed it around this beautiful riffle system. I caught lots of striped shiners, scarlet shiners, and telescope shiners of which I kept a good number for our various purposes. After this upper body workout I hurt for two days, though. It ain't easy pulling a big net out of fast flowing water, trust me.

Our big discovery this week in the lab was made by Andrew. He started a project to examine the scarlet shiners Jennifer used in her masters' project for gill flukes. We know what the 11-KT concentration was in the blood of most of these scarlets, so in principle we should find some relationship between elevated 11-KT levels (breeding condition) and fluke number. Andrew was floored yesterday, because in the first group of fish he's examined there's a pretty tight correlation between gill fluke infection and 11-KT value (if known). The rap on testosterone is that it's usually an immunosuppressant, and I think we have some good evidence of that with these scarlet shiners, collected in May or June three years ago. I'll keep you posted.