On To ASIH In Providence

I'm flying out to Providence, RI, tomorrow morning for this year's American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists meeting. It's always good to be with a bunch of other people who think that mucking around for fish or frogs is fun. I'm doing a talk on gill fluke infections in Telescope Shiners at 3 on Friday afternoon at the Fish Life History session which I'll be moderating.

Yesterday I inventoried my Fundulus majalis and F. similis ethanol preserved fish collections. I want to move on with this DNA thing, although I'm still not sure exactly how I'll pay for it. I have plenty of majalis from Charleston, SC, to re-extract, a single fish from Nantucket, and several small individuals from Cuttyhunk Island off of Woods Hole, MA. And I have a lot of similis from St. Joe Beach on the Florida panhandle. The DNA extraction is time-consuming but easy, then I have to get them PCR'd and sequenced. And, I also have to do this for the bifax I have which in truth is a higher priority. Luckily I still have a lot of phenol-chloroform-isoamyl alcohol blend at hand.