go_lately

we got to pull apart froggies! BIG headless skinless froggies. we were doing our lab on nerve action potentials so we isolated the sceatic (sp?) nerve that runs from the patella to the top of the spinal column, removed it, put it in a plexiglass voltage conductor and measured the action potentials under different sets of conditions.

anyone who has ever had their kneecap tapped in the doctor's office knows that a manual mechanical stimulation to a nerve can create an automatic muscular response. so imagine trying to isolate this huge main nerve in the frog's leg and abdomen using mainly blunt disection, while said frog is lying on a bed of wax with no skin and no head . . . kicking strongly. i thought it was pretty fucking cool but you should have seen the expressions of the faces of my lab partners.

know what the horrible part is? i'm a bio major, with a concentration in animal physiology no less, prob a 2nd semester junior credit-wise . . . and i swear to god this is the first disection i have ever done. i abstained for moral reasons in high school, got out of intro bio (and bio lab) cause of my ap scores, so . . . this is the first opportunity. meanwhile penny's gushing about disecting cats. and i've seen the insides of god knows how many animals (and people) and euthanizations and blah blah blah. but this is the first wet disection lab i've ever done. *shrug*