A week in the office

I can’t believe almost one month has gone by since I arrived in Wisconsin! This week was spent in the office but it has really flown by. Much of this week I spent in the lab dissecting brook trout and checking them for gill lice infection. On Thursday I went to check how many fish I have worked through so far and it is over 100! I have become much better at removing the otoliths and it almost feels normal now to work through a bag of fish. From not finding the otoliths every 3rd fish, I now find them in every fish I open up which shows me far I have come in such a short time. While working through these fish, I checked each fish to see what gender they were (male, female, or unknown). Female brook trout are easily identifiable by two sacks with hundreds of small white eggs, that flank the body cavity. Males have been slightly more difficult to identify for me, they also have two sacs inside the body cavity but these tend to be smaller and not nearly as distinct as the egg sacs. While I was cutting open one of the fish to check its gender, I felt something very hard in the fish’s stomach. Being a naturally curious person, I cut open the stomach to find the body of a sculpin and a mayfly. It was very cool to see in real life some of the organisms that brook trout eat. Until next week!

Each envelope is labeled with the length, weight, sex of the fish and a small tube with the otoliths taken from the fish.

This the microscope that I have been using in the lab to look at gill lice.

This is a icture of the sculpin found in the stomach of a brook trout.