I'm Back In To The Game

I've been distracted for the last 6 weeks or so, and I think I'm about to recover. I co-chaired a faculty search committee and that's like leaving your life behind; we haven't even filled the position yet, which is of course a long, twisted story.

But... Research stuff is going well. Robert defended his Master's thesis last Tuesday on gill parasite infection in tennessee snubnose darters. We've tentatively named a new species of dactylogyrid that is the parasite present: Aethycteron simoterum. We still have to sharpen our description of its traits, but I think we can call up the digital images he's made and use the confocal's software to precisely measure the length of the various haptor hooks, etc.

Brian defended his thesis on Wednesday, on the niche partitioning of the most common darter species in the Flint River at Three Rivers, and in Estill Fork of the Paint Rock River downstream from the Methodist Church. He has a very impressive work-up of seasonal shifts of habitat use of various substrates, flow rates, and depths. At the Flint, the three species examined -- banded, black and redline darters -- have a very strong partitioning, with blacks in shallow, slower water over sand; the bandeds in deeper water over boulders; and the redlines in fast, relatively shallow water over cobble. The community at Estill Fork, with five species, is more complicated partially because it's a smaller, shallower stream. We found rainbow and tennessee snubs in much the same habitat, which is a little weird, and redlines in the habitat where rainbows "should" be -- faster water over cobble. But I'll save the details for the paper when it comes out.

We survived the tornados yesterday, several went along the northern edge of the city of Huntsville but we saw little wind, and surprisingly little rain in south Huntsville. But the Flint River's level and volume are way up because many of the most intense storms ran over its upper basin, the river gauge showed a meter rise and over a tripling of volume between noon yesterday and today. Luckily we weren't planning to go out this weekend.