Back In Gear, Back In 'Bama

I'm back from two weeks in Panama. Hopefully my export permit will be approved by the end of the summer so that colleagues at the Smithsonian can mail me my fish... I found 3 species of Brachyrhaphis where I only expected to find one, so this work could be even more interesting than I'd thought. I'll keep you posted.

A new student, Kara, has agreed to look at black snubnose darters for gill parasites. We'll get the darters from the Flint River where we're doing other projects. I'm curious to see if they have a similar low level of incidence as Tennessee snubnoses from Estill Fork. This will be a good complement to Robert's work I hope.

I also received a box from Charlie Nunziata with Fundulus that he and others collected at ~12 sites in the Florida panhandle. Hopefully DNA sequencing will show whether some of these populations are a new species, or (just) an interesting intergrade between F. notti to the west and F. lineolatus to the east, both members of the subgenus Zygonectes. I have all of them jarred in 95% ethanol until I get the right DNA extraction kit. Hopefully this goes easy...