Recycling Old Silverstripe Shiners, Kinda

I keep poking at this NeuroReport manuscript we have. The big revelation this week is that we need brain size data from telescope and silverstripe shiners to go along with our western blot data as we've done with scarlet shiners. We already have telescope data from last fall, thanks to Brittany and Alexandra. So I've put Alexandra on to dissecting the brains from a monthly collection of silverstripe shiners we collected at Borden Creek in the Sipsey Wilderness in May 2004. They've been in formaldehyde, but weren't in really top condition; five of the twenty were dried out, five of the ten males at that. So I changed over the fluids of the remaining fifteen, and Alexandra has so far done the basic moves on ten of them a five/five sex ratio. With the last several females done, we'll have a believable sample size to make some kind of statement about brain size. We collected 17 silverstripes in June, but we removed the brains from all of them and suspended them in lysis buffer for western blots. Phew!

I've also made some serious progress on my flame chub manuscript, which has been lingering for eight months. NatureServe has some articles written by their staff about assessing element occurrences, basically a scale for rating the near-term viability of a local population. It runs from A at the top, to D for poor, and F for failed to find, X for extirpated. So I rated the 18 historic collection sites where we found flame chubs in our survey. The element occurrence distribution broke down as follows: for the sites where we found no flame chubs, 31 F, 4 X (basically the creek was gone); for the sites with flame chubs, 1 A, 4 AB, 5 B, 1 BC, 5 C and 2 CD. This means that in my opinion eleven out of the eighteen current occurrences have a good chance of surviving over the next 20-30 years, and this from a total of 53 sites we visited. That's pretty poor. So I argue that the state status for flame chubs should be lowered to S2, Imperiled, from the current status of S3, Vulnerable, and the global status should be changed to G2, Imperiled. Hopefully various editors, etc., will agree with me.

I'm going up to Tennessee tomorrow to spend the day with Casper and some other NANFA people in the Buffalo River system. The weather should be perfect.