the CK-A2 locus

I'm sitting here in Hunter Library on the campus of WCU in beautiful Cullowhee NC. The lab I'm working in is conveniently located less than 3 minutes walking time from where I sit. I sit with 4 theses and one "FINAL REPORT to the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission". They are all about brook trout in the southern Appalachian mountains, mostly North Carolina, but one of the theses includes data from Southern Virginia. Unfortunately, I don't think I can remove these from the library. But I will go find out. Right now.

I'm back. It turns out, because I have so much caché (I haven't shaved in 2 weeks) I can indeed check these out. But because I didn't have the PI in my lab arrange for me to check out books, I will have to pay $10 for a library card. I don't care. I'm really quite obsessed with brook trout right now.

A full report, possibly in several parts, will follow in the next couple days. Complete with maps, figures, and gobs of real, cold, hard datum. Open chasm, chastise, fathom. Datum.

The data/datum thing is tricky.

But I do want to mention now that, as I suspected, Jimmy Jacobs, the author of Trout Streams of Southern Appalachia: Fly-casting in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, was mistaken about Flat creek. The location of my short game triumph I wrote about in the last entry. Flat Creek supports a mixed population of brook trout: CK-A2*100 allele frequency is 0.77. That means that more than 3/4 of the alleles at the CK-A2 locus are native to the southern apps. Which is a lot. But there are still lots of northern alleles in the population.

Much more exciting trout tomorrow. A lout eats yarrow. Barrow. Wheel.