I really wasn’t looking forward to these two weeks. For one thing, formaldehyde makes me cry, just like onion. For another, we had been warned of both pregnant rats (and we later discovered that it was a very needed warning.) Yuck!!
Tuesday morning of last week broke bright and early and I got to my lab by 7:30. After a brief explanation of how to skin our poor rat, we went up to the front to get our rat.
In order for the rats to fit in our dissection pan comfortably, we have to cut off the tail. (It also really helped the squeamish factor. My lab partner and I were very thankful to see our tail go.) Tomorrow, after we finish dissecting our rats, we will have a competition for the best rat name. I think formaldehyde does something to our brains because nobody in our lab could think of a good name (Stuart and Templeton were both thrown around, but most of our rats were female.) I thought it would be fun to make up a story about our rat, about why she was so much smaller than the others, but we couldn’t make up one of those either.
Skinning the rat turned out to be no pleasant job because the connective tissue held firm.
But it was amazing to see how the muscles overlapped and looked like one giant muscle with fibers going in different directions. Also, every organ that we saw was beautifully and wonderfully made (even in a rat!) One of the coolest things was the pancreas, which did not have a firm structure and looked like cottage cheese. Anyway, it was not quite as bad as I anticipated it to be, but I'm still not looking forward to tomorrow and the rest of the dissection. By the way, did you know that rats have no gallbladder and no appendix?
Right now, my nameless, tailless, and taleless, rat is sitting, wrapped in a damp chuck, in my lab desk drawer waiting for me to come and cut her up some more. If you have any good ideas for names, suggest away. She was a black/white, small rat who had yellow teeth, was only slightly pregnant, and didn’t want to be skinned at all!
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