THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

acteria feeding on it, or other inputs such as silage liquor which is full of sugars, find it particularly
easy to utilize, and as such have an absolute feeding and breeding field day. The ultimate party.
As has been said, traditional biological sampling relies solely on presence or absence. Limited
inferences can also be made from community mixes. But that's about as subtle as it gets.
Clearly then, what was needed, was some way of accessing stress related data from living animals
whose quality of life is very poor, but still they are hanging on in there full of information accumulated
over their life-time, which typically for a stickleback is around three years.
That's a lot of potential information if it could be accessed, particularly as it would allow investigators
to look back over time using a single sampling event by collecting different age groups which would
not be possible using other approaches. Something that can readilybe done by measuring the asymmetry
in traits that are not important for out-right survival.
Sounds simple. But first there were a number of very fundamental questions which needed to be
answered to see if any of the data generated would be of value, the most important of which being, was
there a direct and holding correlation between loss of symmetry (FA) and declining water quality of
such an accuracy that one would automatically imply the other.
Heritability and reversibility were two further fundamental considerations. If FA can be inherited after
water quality has improved, then it would no longer be there as a result of that individual or populations
stressed environment.
Similarly, if it could be reversed should water quality improve, then the information wouldn't be stored
as a record of stress over a life-time. Only when satisfactory answers to these questions were available
could the viability of the project be assessed.
Fortunately, in research science, a negative result, while it might be disappointing, can still be a useful
result, and is most definitely a valid demonstration of research ability and technique.
Investigating the reversibility question was going to take at
least a year, and the heritability question, which involved
running the reversibility experiment on to the next
generation, would take the best part of a further year beyond
that.
In the meantime, I was still in a position to start running the
main experiment, which if it turned out not to show the
correlation I was looking and hoping for, could still be
written up. But first things first. I had to construct a pond in
my garden to house a sample of sticklebacks taken from the
worst possible water quality fish holding scenario I could
find.
Based on routine EA biological surveys, this was a small
stream on Merseyside listed as the poorest Class 4 habitat
from which I hand netted one hundred mature sticklebacks.
That sample was then split across two buckets, one
containing anaesthetic solution, and the other, water from
the stream itself for transportation back to their new home
Electro-fishing for Sticklebacks in my garden which had been allowed to mature, and
according to ongoing weekly chemical analysis, was a
Class 2 environment where the 'fortunate fifty' would be left alone for a year.
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