In addition to the Undergraduate Student Symposium, where all of our students presented results or status reports for their various projects, the post-docs, staff, and faculty involved in this initiative met to discuss the status of the CToL project in general and met with staff from the Bell Museum regarding proposed outreach efforts for our Tree of Life project.

Our week was filled with great times and excitement as we were able to join again and share our summer experiernces, experience a whole different cypriniform fauna than we experienced in the Mobile Basin in Alabama in June, and enjoy everyone's company as several social events.

While we were in the Twin Cities area we spent a day sampling fishes in the upper Mississippi River, a fauna very different from the Mobile Basin fauna that we sampled in June 2005 at our Alabama meeting. In the field we used seines, backpack shockers, and an electrofishing boat provided by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and operated by xxxxx. We sampled various habitats in the river above Lock and Dam #1, the first navigational dam on the Mississippi River.

All of the students learned some about the geological history, importance, and long independence of the Mississippi River, relative to the Mobile Basin rivers, and the resulting highly different evolutionary histories of the two ecosystems and their faunas. A total of xx fish species were sampled during our field studies, all of which were sampled for use in our systematic studies, including xx species for the CToL project.

Students were also safety trained for sampling with electrofishing gear and different sampling methods. All persons were given time on the exciting shocking boat where many large cypriniform species were uniquely available. For most of the species sampled with the electrofishing boat none of them were obtained by seining, despite considerable effort!

Below, is a list of the species sampled and some photographs and movies of our expedition. Enjoy!