With The New School Year...

With the new school year I'm definitely off and running. I have three students who are willing and hopefully able to work on examining both silver shiner and blotchside chub populations in the Flint River, the basic stuff like length, sex, and reproductive condition. I also hope that we can establish how widespread the silver shiners in particular are in the river. Another student has volunteered to look at gill parasites in the silvers; I talked to Don Cloutman from Bemidji State the other day and he told he that he has described Dactylogyrus gill parasites from more than 200 North American cyprinids including the silver shiner, and with that he's about ready to retire apparently.

Others are working on the driftnet project (two more months to go) and on the Brachyrhaphis I collected in Panama. So it could be good for raw data generated.

And meanwhile Brian and Robert are close to finished with their field work on darters and will hopefully defend in the spring.

We plan on doing a big day on the Flint next Sunday, with driftnetting, transecting and netting for silver shiners and blotchside chubs. As long as we can park in a secure, convenient place it should be almost easy....