Significant Relationship Between Telescope Shiner Length & Parasite Load

I finally had a chance to sit down, set up the data, and run a regression on the relationship between standard length and number of Dactylogyrus spatulus parasites for telescope shiners from Hurricane Creek in 2007. We knew that the r-squared was 0.08 from doing the calculation within the graphing function of Excel, but I had a suspicion that there could still be significance in that number because we have 280 fish in the sample set. And sure enough, we got an F value of over 25, with P<0.01. So there's not a sharp rise in parasite load with increasing fish size, but it is a statistically robust relationship. I still want to do separate regressions for males and females which will take a little more wrangling to set up the data sets.

Yesterday I had another realization, that we should examine the brain size of silverstripe shiners collected from Borden Creek in 2004. We have the GSI information for them too, so it would be an interesting data set for comparison to both scarlet and telescope shiners. The relationship should be pretty similar to telescopes, since they're closely related as well as minimally sexually dimorphic. Maybe Alexandra would like to do this?