Graduate Student Receives Fish Research Grant By Desiree Cooper Current graduate student Rick Raymondi (attending) was awarded the New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute (WRRI) Student Water Research Grant, which provides funds for water-related research throughout the state. Rick said the application process alone was challenging. He had to convince the grant committee in just three pages, giving enough background on his research objective, his methodology, and the significance of this research. Rick discussed his plans for the grant and what the award means to him. “I will be using this reward to improve our wet lab located in the Behavioral
Ecology Laboratory at ENMU by
and uninterrupted flow, which is
purchasing equipment that will improve
required to advance to the juvenile
Eastern’s fish husbandry practices
life stage.
and to monitor water quality during research,” Rick said. “My project relies on being able to artificially spawn fish in the lab as their larvae are the subject of my experiment.” Rick is performing a study to test the effects of high discharge released from reservoirs on pelagic-spawning minnows of the Pecos River in New Mexico. Pelagic-spawning minnows are a group of fish whose females release eggs directly in the water column to be fertilized by males. The fertilized eggs
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He explained that dam construction on the Pecos River has fragmented the river, so it no longer resembles the historical conditions in which these fishes thrived and evolved. “My ultimate goal is to work with anadromous fish in the Northwest U.S.,” explained Rick. “Because my research project involves desert fishes and not salmonids, I am learning techniques every professional needs when pursuing a career in the sciences.”
drift downstream, where they hatch and
Rick added that his coursework and
continue drifting as larvae. The fish rely
the mentoring he received from ENMU
on water temperature and streamflow
faculty helped him become familiar
as environmental cues to initiate
with the grant writing process and its
spawning behavior with a continuous
associated technical writing aspects.
Green & Silver | December 2020
