Dissecting Squid

Its always nice to start of your almost non-stop ten hour day with a squid dissection at 9am on a Monday morning.

 The same as previous dissections, I drew the external anatomy before i started the dissection. I drew it laterally as it gave a better view of the head and tentacles.There was only enough time for one diagram I thought this was the best.

(above: diagram of the external anatomy of the squid. I took it before id finished my sentence at the bottom, whoops!)

Then we dissected the squid (this dissection was done in pairs). First we had to work out if we had a male or female. There are not ovary's which is the obvious sign. Ours had a penis and a spermatophore sac which has a different texture to what's around it for example the digestive caecum. 

(above: the dissection of the squid.)

After we had decided which gender it was, we then got to locating where certain things were: ink sac, heart, vena cava, rectum etc. We filled it with water so that we could see things better and found the heart (with a little help as its small and hard to spot). With all things located I then drew the internal anatomy of the squid.

(above: Internal anatomy of the squid. I did correct the spelling on this after I took it.)

We then had to do the rest of the write up, explaining functions of some of its anatomy (eg. fins/ink sac). 

This was one of the smellier ones,  even though I was wearing gloves, I still had to wash my hands a good few times to get the squid smell out.

Sully Shore Field Trip

We got a coach to Sully shore to do a species diversity survey along the shoreline of the different algae, seaweed, molluscs and barnacles etc.

Getting to our starting point was an adventure in itself, the seaweed was very slippery and the rocks with out seaweed were wet from rain and slippery all the same.

We had to measure the decline (/incline) of the slope down from the cliff to the sea. We did this by using a 30m tape measure as a transect and then measured every 2m with two striped poles and measuring the height difference between each. At every 2m a quadrat is placed and all the species present recorded as well as the percentage of each of the species within it.

Being Wales and winter it was raining on and off the entire time we were there with only one brief interval of sun. When it got just after four the sun went down and it got so bitterly cold that I could barely feel nor move my hands much. And I was pretty sure my wellies had started to leak...