Low Water Flow At Estill Fork, & Telescope Shiner Article Now Out In American Midland Naturalist

I went to Estill Fork Wednesday afternoon with Brittany and James. The creek level and flow were way down from March, and James (not Taito!) and I were wading without waders in the 17 deg. C water on a beautiful spring day. While the drift net was running we seined about 20 telescope shiners and about 12 tennessee shiners. The tennessees were just beginning to develop that eye-popping orange breeding coloration. Hopefully we can run some dot-blot assays of brain samples from both species as part of our seasonal monitoring of NMDAR variation. Taito has just finished running a series of assays on January and February scarlet, silverstripe and telescope shiners, and the basic pattern seems to be no significant differences between species in mid-winter as opposed to scarlets having elevated levels during the last breeding season.

Our article in the April 2010 American Midland Naturalist is now out. It's "Reproductive Timing of the Telescope Shiner, Notropis telescopus, in Alabama, USA", by Brittany Holmes, Lindsay Whittington, Loren Marino, Andrew Adrian, and Bruce Stallsmith, Vol. 163, No. 2, pg(s) 326–334. I still have to get a .pdf of the final version.

Also -- Andrew placed second yesterday for his presentation to the joint Honors Presentations of the combined University of Alabama system. He presented our findings on Dacytylogyrus gill parasite infection rates in telescope shiners over the course of a year in the upper Paint Rock River system. He did a great job in both the organization of the presentation, and in answering questions from the floor after he finished. Out of a dozen or more oral presentations, his was (of course) the only one that could be described as organismal biology, or ecology.