Many who hear the words dissection usually cringe. They tend to wonder who would ever want to place themselves in a strongly smelling, poorly ventilated room for hours, hovering, for hours, over a dead, preserved animal of some sort? However the source of some peoples disgust is the driving factor of others fascination. For those who are not into dissections my morning would have been very unpleasant to you. I on the other hand could not have asked for a better way to start my day than with the beginning dissection of a Dogfish Shark.
*Note while discussing sciency things I will use scientific terms because I think it is important to learn new thing whenever you can and I would be depriving y'all of wonderful knowledge if I put things in layman's terms. So get prepared to learn some anatomy and shark parts terms!!!
 |
| Yes that oily stain on the paper is shark juice. If your not getting dirty your not doing it right. |
My partner and I successfully identified the external anatomy of our shark who we have yet to name (just to let those of you who have never dissected before it is very common to give your specimen a name), and we sort of successfully skinned our shark from the dorsal (back) side to the ventral (stomach) side, just posterior (towards the tail) from the eye to just posterior of the pectoral fin in order to reveal the muscles we needed to identify. Although there were a few jokes about practically butchering the muscle under the skin and making some kind of bad shark sushi with our scapula. Sorry sometimes science humor is a little strange but I'm glad there are some of you who understand it...
I thought I would share some some cool things I learned about shark anatomy :) you can use the shark sketches to give you an idea of where the part of the shark that I am describing is located. The first cool shark part is the spiracle. The spiracle is an opening posterior (toward the tail) and dorsal (on the back side) from the sharks eye. It is found on both sides of the head and is an incurrent water passageway, which leads into the mouth. It's purpose is in assisting in respiration. The second interesting anatomical feature of the dogfish shark is the Ampullae of Lorenzini. These are patches of pores found around the snout of the shark. They are sensitive to changes in water pressure, changes in temperature, electrical fields and salinity.
One more cool things about dissections and then I will tell you about the rest of the days experiences. After a fellow group of classmates cut open the stomach of their dogfish they recovered an entire dogfish pup (baby), which was not likely her own, as well as two mostly digested fish heads, which were about the size of my hand. While this does not seem like a ton of food for a shark you have to understand that their shark is about 14 inches long. Therefore the amount and size of the contents of their sharks stomach amazed me! I apologize for the lack of dissection photos but will be sure to post some next Thursday :)
 |
| All I have to say is YUM!!! |
On other things my roommate, Jen and I ventured to Island Naturals (the Hawaiian equivalent of whole foods, although on a much smaller scale) for a wonderful hawaiian lunch. I went for the hawaiian sweet potato salad, which is the purple stuff, curried tofu, Japanese noodles, and fajita style chicken. It was all delicious but I could have had just a huge bowl of Japanese noodles and been extremely satisfied. They were amazing!!! Nothing however compared to my new favorite drink...Alo. It is this incredibly sweet, refreshing oddly green drink that I can't seem to get enough of. The strange part is that it has many alo pieces in it that float around but they are actually the best part and make a delicious pop of sweet fluid in your mouth when you squish them. To those of you who have never heard of it, all I have to say is you have to try it. I looked it up online and apparently you can get it at Whole Foods and Safeway... I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT! :)
On the island adventuring side of things Kanoe and I met another friend from our coral reef class out at Rainbow falls (it seems to becoming our new after school goto) for a swim and a few dives off of the cliffs. Today we also walked out to the edge of the waterfall. Viewing the massive plunge to the water below was a bit scary but the waterfall from such an angle was really cool. It was also a day that should go down in history because Kanoe taught me how to skip rocks and not only did I attempt it but I actually succeeded in skipping not one, but two rocks across the pristine waters. Now don't get me wrong the fist two rocks I attempted to skip quickly plunged to the depths of the water after making a dramatic splash. However after a few tweaks in my technique by Kanoe, the expert in rock skipping, who not only skipped his rocks marvelously every time but actually succeeded in hitting a rock wall about 40 feet away, I was able to get two skips in by two rocks!!
That seems to conclude my adventures for the day.
Aloha mainlanders :) Till tomorrow
No comments:
Post a Comment