Goals: To collect 25 males and 25 females in another saltwater ‘control’ site in the Port St. Joe/Apalachicola area
Achievements: Collected 45 males & 21 females in addition to 4 developing females and 14 non-pregnant males
Today we decided to try another site here in the Port Saint Joe area since our collection yesterday was from the strangest population we’ve ever really seen. This time we decided to try on the island on the other side of Apalachicola Bay.
We had some trouble locating a site initially, but with the help of a friendly ranger at St. George Island State Park, we found promising seagrass beds and collected some pipefish. We caught all the fish we needed in a couple hours of pulling nets. During that time we also saw a bonnethead shark (which are pretty harmless), several stingrays, and a dolphin chasing fish. It was a pretty exciting day!
Sarah Flanagan 
[…] populations in the Gulf of Mexico (I wrote about the collecting trip in a series of blog posts1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8). I took the DNA and cut it up into a bunch of little pieces using special proteins and […]