Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Perches Are Peachy

"What are you two geniuses doing?" - My Uncle Josh, coming over to the table.
"We're not geniuses." - Kara.
"Speak for yourself!" - Anna, jokingly.
"We're trying to get the skin off of Kara's perch, and we've pealed most of it off, but there's still all that meat covering the organs..." - Anna, peering into Kara's perch.

Yeppers. We're on the perch. We aren't really going in a particular order, as far as experiments go. Our Science teacher (dressed in camouflage hunting clothes on this occasion.) simply asked what we were doing tonight, Kara said (something like) she thought it was the perch - so off we went.

(Grandpa's always full of the correct biological information and forever knowing what one ought to be finding in any typical highschool biology dissection. In other words,  he's always ready for whatever we throw at him. Grandpa was a professional Biology teacher.)

(No. I do not normally wear that jacket. From left to right, Kara, me and Grandpa.)


So we began. I whipped right through that experiment, and found most of what I was supposed to.

Oh, I didn't mention that we didn't bother to wear gloves doing this experiment. Grandpa must have forgotten to bring them out, and we didn't care enough about it to ask for them. So, we got that nasty formaldehyde smell on our hands. But that's okay.

What I wrote in my lab notebook (Edited version):

Teeth description: Rather like large sharpish grains of sand.
Tongue is attached at the back of mouth.
Anterior fin: Is supported by spines
Posterior fin: Supported by rays
Tail (Candal) fin: Rays
Anal fin: Rays
Pelvic fin: Rays
Flippy (Pectoral) fin: Rays

Number of gills on  right side: 4
Left: 4

What I couldn't label:

Gall bladder

Kidney and air bladder - removed prematurely.

All Brain Lobes.

See, Anna got scissor happy and accidentally cut most of the head of her fish off. Yeah. So then, she thought, to make things easier, she'd cut it completely off.

As she tried to cut the scull (that Grandpa said she could cut) with the scissors, (after scraping the scull for a few short seconds and realizing that her thumb was squishing into the fish's eye - though, it wasn't because of the "eye thing" that the method was changed) the  lobes of the brain fell out, or were pulled out, when a violent jerk (or something) launched them out of the fishes head.

Anna's lab notebook was full of drawings and sloppy/quick handwriting. Her hands were full of formaldehyde, and her tray was full of tools, holes and a decapitated, gutted, fish.



                                                     She was done and She'd done well.

2 comments:

Bethany d said...

You missed our team try to cut through the skull. It didn't work. We ended up puncturing the brain and the contents flew over us poor scientists.

And to be honest, I didn't find any of the organs either. ;)

Anna said...

lol:)