Things Are Happening, Really!

I haven't written for a week out of sheer procrastination. One fun thing lately is I received 100 g of Damar Gum, a key component of making archival wholemount slides. Hopefully we can get a really good series of dactylogyrids found in darter gills. Kara made a good one over the weekend using Kleermount, which is a synthetic form of Damar but not really archival. She successfully transferred one worm from the gills of a stripetail darter. She had a lesson today on using the confocal microscope, and used this slide to learn how to capture images. Connie, the tech, was impressed by the images so I guess they're good(!). Luckily for Kara she worked with Connie just in time, Connie starts maternity leave tomorrow for obvious reasons.

We're going out to the Flint Friday morning to do transects for Brian's project. The river is REALLY low right, since we haven't had rain for about three weeks. I think this means we can easily do our fourth transect just below the bridge, through a fast deep hole frequented by big greenside darters. We should have a large crew of people show up to help, so it should be easier in general.