Wednesday's Science Story

And a fact or two thrown in, maybe.

First, for those who won't read about the rest, here's an interesting tidbit about why leaves fall. The article doesn't mention cold as a factor, but considering all the leaves that fell in the snowstorm, it seems like that's part of it. Yay for crunchy leaves underfoot!

Monday was an exciting day at work. I got to do not one, but TWO dissections. Our next newsletter is going to have science teaching tips and projects about reptiles and amphibians...I discovered that herpetology projects you can do at home are not so easy to find. (So no one steal this idea! :) ) But my dad - my boss, for readers who don't know me - thought hey, maybe we could do a comparative anatomy activity. Hence me spending the afternoon with scissors, a scalpel, and some smelly preserved specimens.

The frog was actually a lot of fun. I started with her first, because I knew I could do it. (Plus, there were instructions.) Although I didn't manage to find the gall bladder and some other important organs, the ones i did see were pretty cool. This specimen had a huge blue liver, an easily-identifiable stomach (Annie said to cut it open to examine the contents, but I forgot about that until just now), and other colorful parts that photographed nicely. The most interesting feature was the clump of round blackish eggs inside, sort of nestled loose between the intestine and the back of the abdominal cavity (or whatever you call it).

The snake was a lot harder. There are NO good snake dissection guides on the entire World Wide Web!! So I had to kind of make up how to do it. (Moral: when you slice open a snake specimen, do one incision up the middle of its belly, rather than cut the skin along each side of the belly and then try to lift it off.) Snakes have a see-through, slimy-looking membrane inside to hold all their organs in place, which makes sense considering all the twisting and slithering they do. So most of the dissection was spent removing the membrane from various organs.

Unfortunately for our warehouse crew, I was in the midst of slicing and dicing when they took their break. After staring in fascinated horror for a minute, most of them turned around and headed back to the warehouse. Sorry for that!

After 30 minutes or so the fumes were starting to get to me, so I decided it looked about right and declared myself done. My dad came to look (he's wanted to dissect one of these guys since we started carrying them last year, I think) and decided it looked a little too amateurish. So he proceeded to take the specimen more apart and find other organs I hadn't, namely the kidneys, testes, gall bladder, and pancreas. That's about half of the main organs, in fact. (Locating the heart, an empty stomach, trachea, lung...most snakes have only their right lung...and large and small intestine is not too hard.) Good times.

It was a worthwhile project, though: the external and internal anatomy of a frog and snake are interesting to contrast. The frog guts look a lot more complicated, but then it doesn't spend it's life crawling on its belly and swallowing its food whole, either.

Speaking of which, check out this kangaroo-meets-constrictor slideshow Andrea found for me! It's wild.