On Dissection
Urk. Nothin' like scraping open the cartilaginous skull of a shark with your hands and a scalpel to make you appreciate being clean-smelling.
When we first started on the dogfish sharks, they were passably pungent. I mean, they smelled like formaldehyde, and all, but at least they didn't make you any more nauseous than, say, walking through Chinatown in high summer. Smelly, but pretty bearable.
But a week later?
Oh gods, they smelled to high heaven, and the fact that we were doing the nervous system didn't help. I mean, they'd had a whole week to break down even more, and they'd been injected with latex so taht we coudl see the veins and arteries, so the insides were a mess of sticky, goopy, yellow ichor.
Try shaving off extra "viscera" while that collects on your gloves.
It's not that it's not interesting to do dissections, because it is. I mean, it's seriously fun once you forget about the whole "I am cutting up the decomposing corpse of a once-living organism" bit.
It's just the horrific smell that permeates the laboratory that makes the whole thing uncomfortable. Other than that, This has probably been the most amusing course I've ever taken.
I'm gonna miss it when the semester ends.
When we first started on the dogfish sharks, they were passably pungent. I mean, they smelled like formaldehyde, and all, but at least they didn't make you any more nauseous than, say, walking through Chinatown in high summer. Smelly, but pretty bearable.
But a week later?
Oh gods, they smelled to high heaven, and the fact that we were doing the nervous system didn't help. I mean, they'd had a whole week to break down even more, and they'd been injected with latex so taht we coudl see the veins and arteries, so the insides were a mess of sticky, goopy, yellow ichor.
Try shaving off extra "viscera" while that collects on your gloves.
It's not that it's not interesting to do dissections, because it is. I mean, it's seriously fun once you forget about the whole "I am cutting up the decomposing corpse of a once-living organism" bit.
It's just the horrific smell that permeates the laboratory that makes the whole thing uncomfortable. Other than that, This has probably been the most amusing course I've ever taken.
I'm gonna miss it when the semester ends.