The Deepwater Horizon oil spill released millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, impacting economically and ecologically important fishes. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) present in the oil have been shown to cause developmental impairments in early life stage fishes, such as morphological and behavioral changes related to eye formation and visual processing following PAH exposure. Prior research reported reduced eye growth in open water, pelagic species, as well as reduced photoreceptor-specific transcription factors associated with eye development following exposure to crude oil. Though changes in transcriptomic-level pathways associated with vision and visual processing have been reported, it has yet to be determined how these changes relate to physiological or behavioral-level effects in fish. Therefore, the present studies evaluated the effect of weathered crude oil on eye development and visual function in mahi-mahi, red drum, sheepshead minnow, and zebrafish larvae. Fish were assessed through several visually-mediated behavioral assays, analyzed histologically and immunohistologically, along with subsequent transcriptomic analyses and associated gene expression changes. Larvae exposed to crude oil experienced significantly reduced abilities to exhibit optomotor or optokinetic responses relative to controls, with associated reductions in retinal development. Furthermore, genes associated with eye development and phototransduction were downregulated, with subsequent …

The northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) population decline is a severe, rangewide phenomenon beginning >150 years ago and continuing today. In this investigation, I: 1. document the timeline of bobwhite population decline and unintended genetic consequences of attempted remedies, 2) develop a model useful for predicting possible locations of potentially sustainable bobwhite populations in semiarid rangeland in Texas and Oklahoma, and 3) examine the relationship between population monitoring data and meteorological factors. While breeding season call counts of male bobwhite have been used for >70 years to provide estimates of fall populations for hunting, most studies of call counts have focused on mathematics and statistical accuracy of the count, largely overlooking the influence of meteorological factors on call counts. Here, I present the results of >4,400 individual point counts and examine their relationship with meteorological variables recorded at each stop. Humidity was positively correlated with the number of birds recorded (ρ = 0.275, p < 0.001) and temperature was negatively correlated (ρ = -0.252, p < 0.001). The number of birds recorded was significantly higher in wet years than in drought years. There was no significant correlation between wind velocity and number of birds recorded. These results suggest that, while weather …