RE: NANFA-- mmmmmmm....

Bruce Stallsmith (fundulus_at_hotmail.com)
Fri, 31 Jan 2003 13:09:21 -0500

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Thanks Jan, your comments on Frank McCormick give strength to my convictions
that the rainbows I have are somewhat different from others I've seen.
They're not as brilliant as other rainbows, more to the point. I thought I
had two fairly colorful females, based on collecting them when they were
still small. But now that they've grown up and I look more closely and think
about it, I realize that both are males. They have vivid orange throats, but
the rest of the body coloration is more subdued than the "standard" male
rainbow. And if we're talking about headwater populations more likely being
diagnosable species through allopatric processes, well, this location on
Estill Fork could be ground zero for a small-range species. Now I want to go
and get some more!

--Bruce Stallsmith
Huntsville, AL, US of A

>From: "Hoover, Jan J ERDC-EL-MS" <HOOVERJ_at_wes.army.mil>
>Reply-To: nanfa_at_aquaria.net
>To: "'nanfa_at_aquaria.net'" <nanfa at aquaria.net>
>Subject: RE: NANFA-- mmmmmmm....
>Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 11:57:44 -0600
>
>Todd Crail wrote:
> >>> Hopefully they'll have that Dr. Bones McCoy little scanner thingie
>that
>ties into the universal satellite database to identify everything, and with
>that, still be affordable to the common, grant-less or research
>sponsor-less
>man<<<
>
>Pat wrote:
> >>>Believe it or not, all (or almost all) of these new species are also
>diagnosable using good old fashion male breeding color patterns, or
>counting
>scales & rays. So, it is actually possible to identify breeding males in
>the field.<<<
>
>Jan writes:
>Frank McCormick, a fellow graduate student at OU, studied rainbow darter
>systematics in the late 1980s. He worked mostly with museum specimens but
>he also documented breeding colors during a series of cross-country
>darter-watching trips. I do not know if he has published his data, but I
>believe he was seeing multiple forms that were geographically separated
>from
>each other.
>And...Dr. McCoy's hand-held scanner was really a salt-shaker.
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</x-flowed>