The Flame Chub Manuscript Has Been Accepted

I heard today that my flame chub manuscript has been accepted by the journal Endangered Species Research. The three(!) reviewers all had positive things to say along with constructive suggestions, one of them even explicitly liked the interactive flame chub map that's part of the story. So hopefully I can get this turned around in a reasonable amount of time and get it posted on to their web site which (I think) is how they proceed.

On the other hand, the journal NeuroReport gave us the final blow-off for the shiners NMDAR article. The editor included one statement that confirmed my worst fears: he was afraid his readers wouldn't be interested in the work. My fear was that our work involved too much ecology ("real biology") in a very reductionist field; we aren't just studying one molecule in isolation but relate it to reproductive success and strategy. So, with some relatively minor reformatting we're going to resubmit the manuscript to the journal Behavioural Brain Research which more explicitly expresses interest in work that relates organismal behavior to some aspect of neuroscience. "Interdisciplinary" research is all the rage in academia, but god help you if you actually try it. I had a t-shirt years ago that summed up my attitude on the subject: Fark them if they can't take a joke. I would send one to the editor at NR, but I don't think he'd either get it or appreciate it.

I hope to post pictures soon from our Estill Fork trip on Monday. The water was a good foot deeper than before, with much faster flow, but we still managed to seine 6 telescope shiners for (what else?) western blots to assay NMDAR levels. And, we caught and kept a small lamprey that I have in an aquarium to show to the Vertebrate Zoology class. Running the seine in that kind of flow was my best upper-body workout for the month!