Black Darters R Us

I keep making passes at editing down the black darter manuscript so I can send it back to my editor for Southeastern Naturalist. It's almost ready, now that I've gotten rid of almost half of the Methods and collapsing much of the Results into a Table reporting significant ANOVA results for various comparisons between sexes, months, and the two sites. Including all four Tables that are now inserted in the right place, and two Figures, it comes to 27 pages total compared to the original 39. Scientific writing is all about taut writing, and this manuscript has staggered in that direction. I want to read it front to back one more time before kicking it back.

One goal for the semester that begins tomorrow is to crank out and submit a manuscript on the Dactylogyrus parasites of telescope shiners in the upper Paint Rock system. Andrew has to make one last push to count parasites in our November and December collections, completing our twelve month observations. The November group is mostly finished, and I mentally calculated an average 1.4 parasites per fish from looking at data in the lab book. Andrew and I have agreed that this will be a de facto scientific writing class with him as the lead author for writing the manuscript. And Taito will do an Honors Research project this semester, I think focusing on the brain measurements and western blots of NMDAR for non-breeding silverstripe, telescope and scarlet shiners being collected this month.

We go back out to Estill Fork next Saturday. Luckily the current deep freeze is supposed to let up tomorrow and the rest of the week.