Our First View Of A Darter Gill Parasite, And More DNA

Robert and Jeremy were in the lab yesterday looking at gill arches from rainbow darters that they had set in acetocarmine stain the day before. I saw one trematode attached to a gill filament, but unfortunately the rear 2/3's of the body had been shredded by clumsy arch removal (it was their first try at it). The part I did see looked a lot different from the Dactylogyrus we've seen on shiners; the haptor (attachment) end was fluted and narrower compared to the body, and the animal was slightly larger (~400 micrometers). There is a described species of Aethycteron fluke found on rainbow darters in east Tennessee, and that's our beginning point for ID'ing the flukes we find. But as of now, I can't tell you.

Joe has re-extracted DNA from the stippled studfish we have. I hope to bring a set of 15 samples of DNA to IXG soon for sequencing. This will include 8 samples of the stippled studfish, a southern studfish, three samples of banded killifish I've had for a while and three samples of longnose killifish from St. Joe Beach, Florida. I finally broke that logjam, I hope.