To The Flint Last Sunday

I think 10 of us made it to the Flint on Sunday to run a trifecta: driftnetting, transects for darter habitat niche, and collecting silver shiners and blotched chubs. It was a beautiful day with low water, and we finished everything in just over 4 hours. One thing I've learned about silver shiners is that they travel in tight schools; if you catch one, you'll probably catch nine. We ended with 28 of them, including 3 subadults, and about 30 chubs. We plan to check both gonadal condition, and the status of gill parasites.

I'm now up to 40 DNA extractions on the Telogia project. Once I get the sequences all I have to do is analyze the data... it will be interesting one way or another.

Robert and Kara spent time with the confocal microscope trying to get informative images of gill parasites. My colleague Lynn was very impressed with what she saw of the images, but Robert didn't seem as happy; I still have to see them myself.