Pink parasites are oh so cute!

Yeah, after almost a full year I have finally started my first experiment!  I know that doesn't sound like a very long time to do preliminary work but when you only have 3 years in total the time is flying by!  On Sunday I started infecting the fish for my experiment, by 7 pm my snails started shedding heaps of parasites.  I had gotten 2 fish infected during the day, and then 17 infected Sunday night.  I put the snails in an incubator with a light which cues the parasites to leave the snail.  Then I take the parasites and flourescently dye them (to tell which parasites I put in the fish versus parasites that are already in the fish).  I anesthetize the fish, lay it in a little trough and drop the parasites on them (which look pink in regular light from the dye), wait a few minutes and then put the fish back into water.  To say the least Sunday was a very long day in the lab - 15 hours.  I infected another 11 yesterday and am giving the snails a rest every other day.  3 more days of infections and I should have all the fish done and the experiment up and running for 5 weeks.  I have 3 treatments at low, med and high fish density and am interested in which reproductive strategy the parasite takes in these different treatments.  If there is a low chance of being transmitted to the next host, then it would be advantageous for the parasite to reproduce early (rather than waiting to reproduce inside the eel).  This is what I'm expecting in the high density treatment - when the fish are in high densities they have a low chance of being preyed upon by an eel and thus the parasites inside the fish have a low chance of being transmitted to an eel and thus should choose to reproduce early.  We'll see what happens in a few weeks.  Oh so exciting!