Spring

Meteorological spring started on 1st of March, astronomical on 20th of March. At the Dept. of Animal Science, 2 events mark the begining of spring.

Introducing John

John Zablocki is a recent graduate in Chemistry and Spanish from the University of Montana. He came to Slovenia this September on a Fulbright grant for his project titled "Characterization and conservation of endangered Balkan trout". His first several months in Slovenia were spent working in the Marble Trout Restoration Program in Western Slovenia with the Tolmin Angling Association (Ribiška družina Tolmin). In January he moved from Tolmin to join our lab and is currently working on a project to possibly identify a remaining pure population of Marble trout that were thought to have gone extinct.

He is obsessed with trout, language, fly fishing, and conservation. He plans to continue working in the Balkans to help protect its unique and fragile salmonid biodiversity.

Vrljika field trip, March 09

In a frame of collaboration with prof. dr. Ivan Bogut from Osijek University, Mr. Ante Mikulić, a representative of Angling club Proložac and our old friend Dušan Jesenšek from RD Tolmin, BTRG organized another field trip to Imotsko polje, in the first place to sample minnows. We were again accompanied with a photographer Arne Hodalič and also with his friend Matej Mihailovski; they were mostly interested in taking photos of the Vrljika softmouth trout and Red Lake scenery.

It was also our intention to meet Manu Esteve and John Zablocki there, who were in the mean time trying hard to film spawning behaviour of the softmouth trout in the neighbouring Neretva River. Unfortunately, we somehow didn’t make it and we are now trying to organize this meeting in Slovenia, were Manu is currently making a stay waiting for Hucho spawning.

Visitors

The number of visitors on this blog and on the main Balkan Trout site is approaching 10 000. Counting started about a year after the site was launched. While monitoring visitor's IPs has a lot of limitations it is relatively easy to see visitors from Universities. So here is the list so far. Thank you (cite us).

Country and University in alphabetical order:

Aarhus, Antonio de Nebrija, Belgrade, Bern, Bilkent, Cagliari, Charles , Chicago, Cornell, Delaware, delle Marche, Dijon, Edinburgh, Georgetown, Graz, Innsbruck, Kaiserslautern, King Abdulaziz, Lausanne, Laval, Liege, Maribor, Masaryk , Milano, Montana, Montenegro, MontpellierII, Münster, New Mexico, Nijmegen, Niš, Oklahoma State, Oslo, Oxford, Padova, Salford, San Francisco, Sarajevo, Siena, St. Thomas, Stanford, Stirling, Szent Istvan, Teheran, Torino, Toronto, Turku, Udine, Valparaiso, Victoria, Vienna, Washington, Western Australia, Wisconsin-superior, Yale, Zagreb.

Flag icons taken from famfamfam, public domain.

Database

A database was added to our site, designed by Jurij Krsnik as a part of previously mentioned project. The trout database contains information of all samples of brown and marble trout gathered from Slovenian streams. For every fish, it's photo, location of sampling and results of laboratory analyses are available. The Database was designed to improve the transparency of our research, enable comparison of laboratory findings of collected samples and to simplify new data entry.

Contact the boss for username and password.

Manu

Manu Esteve, postdoc from University of Toronto is studying behaviour of the Salmonidae family (this family includes trout, salmon, grayling, charr and several others). He recently published some pictures from his expedition to Slovenia, observing the spawning habits of marble trout.

Urška is back

Urška has returned from maternity leave last month. She has noticed some changes on our site and wanted an animated gif that some BTGR members already have.

And after a few minutes, the result: