At Least Someone Liked Our Poster(!)

I went out Wednesday morning to visit the poster session at the Alabama Academy of Science meeting at Alabama A&M near here. There was a surprising number of posters, especially from A&M people such as Yong Wang's group who as always are doing nice work. Our poster wasn't splashy with color, only B&W, and you could read most of it from almost a meter away, the old school approach to posters. Most posters there looked like someone's manuscript had been brutally edited, printed in 12 point type single-spaced, and jammed in between school logos and the screaming headline title. Yeah, everyone's a critic, I admit it.

Two posters down from Brittany was a poster from John McCall's group at the University of West Alabama. They've been doing a stream survey in Sumter County, AL, looking for darter species and beginning to relate their presence or absence to various physical parameters such as geology. To date they've found a total of eight different species in the seven streams they've been working. Interestingly, the redfin darter was the most widespread, found in six of the seven streams, and the Tombigbee darter was found only in a tributary to the Tombigbee River which defines much of the northern and eastern boundaries of the county. I was a wiseass and suggested to the student presenting the poster that they test for total dissolved solids as an easy but informative parameter. The group of them were impressed when I told them I'd spent time with family in Meridian, Mississippi, which is just to the west of there, and several of them are from Meridian. With all that, I'm curious to see what they come up with as their project progresses.

The odd thing talking to them was that they were deeply impressed that we were able to catch drifting macroinverts with my home-built driftnet. They'd tried to do that in some local streams with some kind of net they have but said they found nothing after several hours of installation in a stream. Brittany and I are flummoxed at that; we find hundreds of individuals in an hour or so at Estill Fork. Maybe I should build and sell them a net? We'll see...