My lab group went out today to Estill Fork in NE Alabama to do our transect sampling for darter species in a stretch of riffles. All the darters are in color - fantails, stripetails, redline, greensides, tennessee snubnoses, rainbows, along with the following two species:

This is a male blotchside darter that we were handling gently for immediate release. We also found an even larger female.

And we found about a dozen blueside darters today, where usually we only find a few. Here are a male and a female.

And since it's that time of year, here's a flowering Virginia Bluebell. They were out all over the banks, even though there was a severe flooding event last week.

Very nice!

Oh man, I'd love to see even an uncolored blotchside, and there you have a gorgeous nuptial male! The bluesides are very nice too. Too bad that blue doesn't really come out in photos- there are colors we just can't reproduce. Some gentians have that incredibly intense, vibrating blue too.

Nice to see some fish that are not from my area. looks like it was a blue day!!!
and some one picked the top from that bluebell.

Yeah, I wondered about the "picking". It's a remote site, I suspect that the top of the plant was "picked" by last week's flood event.