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.