Back To The Flint On Friday

This Friday is the next new moon, so we'll be back at the Flint in the morning to run driftnets. We'll also net more darters for Kara's project. She looked at about 20 each banded and black darters from June, and found very few gill parasites, slightly more in the bandeds. These are the two most common darter species at this site on the Flint, and it's reinforcing my growing conviction that the most common darter species in local streams will have fewer gill parasites than rarer species. This is certainly the case in Estill Fork, where the very common Tennessee snubnoses have very few parasites while the less common rainbows, fantails, stripetails and redlines have a lot more parasites.

I'm also curious to seine in the Flint in the deeper flowing pool below the riffles we usually sample to look for more silver shiners. The species prefers such areas below riffles, so hopefully we can find more of this species in this area. The Ichthyology class might go back and look for this too, in two weeks.