Dissection

We got Ethan a dissection kit for his birthday.  I'm against killing animals just for the purpose of dissecting but Ethan has really, really wanted to do it and I have fond memories of when I did it in High School.  I loved it! 

I got them from Carolina Biological. They tell you from where they obtain their dissection animals (It is written in their catalog but I can't find it written online).  None are raised specifically for dissection.  Some are by-products of the meat industry and some, like the cats, are those poor animals that were put to sleep at animal shelters and their bodies would have just gone to waste.  Still bothers me but it's better.

Next, Ethan decided that he wanted to dissect the grasshopper from the dissecting kit and the cow's eye the other day.  The eyeball was truly fascinating!  We really enjoyed it.  Gross but very interesting!!  You can do a virtual dissection and/or watch a cow eye dissection here and a great step-by-step picture guide here.

This is the vitreous humor, it's a thick gel that helps give the eyeball it's shape.

This is the lens.  You can't quite tell in the picture but when you look through it, the image you see is upside down, just like how your eye works and then shoots that upside down image onto your retina for your brain to decipher.

Here Ethan is cutting off the cornea.  It is surprisingly really thick.

This is a cross section of the cornea.  See how thick that is?

This is the iris.  It's a muscle that controls how much light enters the eye.  You can only see a very small portion of it from the front of the eye but when you look from the inside, it's really big.

Under the retina, we found this pretty part.  Doesn't it look like the inside of a shell?  The retina was just a very thin layer of black lining.  This iridescent part is called the tapetum and is found in animals with good night vision.  It's used kind of as a mirror to reflect light back through the retina for a better chance to see in the dark.  This is why their eyes seem to glow at night.  Cool!!

The pink blob there is the optic nerve which send the image message to the brain to decipher what is being seen.  It is also the blind spot in everyone's vision.

This is the grasshopper.

Ethan pulled the exoskeleton off of his leg and found the muscle.  Cool!

The grasshopper's insides are basically all smashed together and come out as one big clump.  The big end on the right is the crop.

Today, Ethan dissected the frog.  His favorite dissections have been the frog and the cow eye - bigger and easier to see everything in them.  The big brown organ is the liver and the thicker tube under it is the stomach.  The kids thought that the small intestines looked like worms.  You can do a virtual dissection here.  Cool!

He opened his stomach to what if he could see what he last ate but it was empty...poor frog.

We tried to get into his skull to see his brain but weren't very successful...kind of mutilated it.  Oops.

See our virtual dissection and surgery page - lots of fun stuff to do there