We did a super cool lab this week – and a relatively photogenic one, at that – so I thought I’d post a few photos! We had a bunch of live specimens (mostly marine inverts from Bodega Bay), and we did our first dissection of the semester – a squid. SUPER COOL!

Here’s a planaria, a type of flatworm (phylum Platyhelminthes). SO CUTE!

Planaria are non-parasitic, and can regenerate themselves – maybe in elementary school you did the experiment where you cut their head in half, bilaterally, and each half will grow back into a complete head? Yeah. That’s these guys. (We didn’t do that experiment, though; just looked at them through the dissecting scope). ALSO how hard does this photo rock, considering I took it through the microscope with my iPhone?

Next, we have a chiton (phylum Mollusca) … that’s the chiton in the center, holding on to some other kind of large, empty shell.

Here’s that same chiton inside the tank, giving us a lovely view of it’s mouth (to the far left), and its gills (which are inside that crevice that goes all the way around the body – you can see them nicely in that part at the upper left that is exposed.

There are also some anemones in this photo – phylum Cnidaria (closely related to jellyfish). I tried to get some individual pictures, but they came out crappy. They’re super pretty, though.

And here’s a nudibranch, or sea slug. Also a mollusk. And very, very pretty. (Again, not a great photo). Like I said, all these things came from Bodega Bay, and are relatively easy to find at low tide.

And now for the fun part … SQUID DISSECTION!

Okay, let’s start with a dorsal view of the squid:

There are two fins at the top (anterior) end, and ten appendages at the posterior end (two long “tentacles,” and eight shorter “arms”). You can also see the eyes (right above the arms), and all the spots on the body are called chromatophores – pigmented organs that allow the squid to change colors.

Here, I’ve flipped my squid onto its back, revealing the ventral view, and put my probe through the siphon, or funnel. This is the all-purpose orifice through which waste products, ink, and reproduction takes place. You also have a better view of the arms and tentacles, include the little suction cups:

One of the eyes:

I’ve pulled back the arms to reveal the mouth, which contains a hard and very sharp beak:

More magnificent iPhone scope photography haha; this is the beak magnified under the dissecting scope. ISN’T THAT COOL? It looks like something I’d expect to see on a parrot. Or a dinosaur. 😀 Super sharp:

The dissection (other than the removal of the beak) consists of one single cut: a slit up the middle of the ventral side of the mantle (the sheath that covers the organs). We then pin back the mantle to reveal the organs. (BTW, this is a different squid; the full-body pics of my squid were blurry):

Let’s look a bit closer. Here, I’ve pushed aside some of the organs to revel the “pen” – those straight structures just to the right of center in the photo. The pen is rigid, and made of chitin – the same stuff that makes up the shell of a snail:

Okay, different squid again. This one is male; I’m pretty sure the little oval-shaped organ at the center of the photo is the testis, where sperm is produced. We can also see the ink sac in this photo – the gray and black organ that runs down the middle in the right half of the photo. There wasn’t a lot of ink in this one, but sometimes there is. I have students write their initials with it. 😀 This is also a good time to point out the gills – they’re the two sort of curved structures right near the pins, on the top and bottom.

And yet another squid! This one is female. The large, smooth white structure just above the center of the photo is the nidamental gland, which is part of reproduction, and below that, the clear organ in the bottom right is the ovary. You can even see some eggs:

OKAY! There are other organs it’s possible to see, but it’s tricky to describe that without sticking arrows everywhere. If you’d like a somewhat more thorough “tour,” this is nice dissection video.

When I arrived in class today to proctor an exam for my Evolution students, I found this on the whiteboard:

It legit made me so happy. Also, I told them I would be happy to give them all extra points on their exams … except I wasn’t the one who would be grading them. They still seemed to love me anyway. 😀

I had such a good time teaching lab today. It was our “forensics” lab, where we talk about DNA fingerprinting techniques. (Specifically restriction fragment analysis and PCR). We do two activities – a “paternity test,” where students analyze a “gel” with the mother, child, and four possible fathers, to determine which father is most likely to be the biological dad. Then we try and solve a murder by comparing electrophoresis results for a whole bunch of suspects and comparing them to “blood” found at the crime scene that doesn’t match the victim. It’s the kind of lab that can be super fun or really dull, and today was super fun.

Also, I totally geeked out while teaching it. First, Taq DNA polymerase is just COOL! (It’s what allows us to take small samples of DNA and duplicate them enough to run tests. So much of the stuff we see on NCIS and every other crime show on the planet? POSSIBLE BECAUSE OF TAQ). It’s from a bacteria that lives in hotsprings like the ones at Yellowstone, and I sort of geeked out about how awesome biology is because of cool stuff like this. (There might have been some bouncing).

Then one of my students asked me how it was possible to get DNA from dried up tears, and that got us onto the topic of thousands of years old DNA extracted from frozen mammoths (AND FROM DINOSAUR BLOOD IN MOSQUITOS IN AMBER THAT IS REAL HUSH I BELIEVE IN IT AND I WILL HAVE A T. REX AS A PET SOMEDAY). So, we had a fun conversation about mammoths (and also about T. rex, because it’s possible I literally bounced up and down even more than I had before, and told them how much I really want a T. rex as a pet, even if it ended up eating me. And, I’m pretty sure they understood I WAS NOT JOKING). Then one of my students mentioned the possibility that T. rex had feathers, and I put that discussion off (because it was a bit off-topic) … but then the COOLEST thing happened.

After I dismissed the class, I brought up the subject of T. rex again with the student who had asked (and I won’t go into details here, but I’ll just say that the current “birds evolved from dinosaurs” theory has some GAPING holes, and should in no way be considered an absolute at this point in time) … ANYWAY … I started talking about this, and about a third of the class just STAYED TO LISTEN! They could have walked out, I expected them to walk out, but a bunch of them stopped, and stood around and they were totally interested in this little paleontology discussion we had and IT MADE ME SO HAPPY! Because I really did geek out at them quite a lot today, and they don’t seem to mind. If anything, I think it helps them get excited about the subject.

And I realized that THIS, really, is the best thing I can give them. Sure, they’ll learn some bits and pieces of biology from me in class, and hopefully remember at least some of it into the future. But if I can do something that helps THEM get as excited about science as I am, THAT is the real gift. And they probably won’t geek out about the same things I do, but that doesn’t matter, as long as they get the idea that it’s okay to geek out about SOMETHING. And holy crap, biology has an ENDLESS SPECTRUM of things that are geek-out worthy. Because biology is just F-ING COOL!

I think that might be my true calling. To help at least some of my students discover just how much they actually love biology, and see that it’s fine to express that. (Although I don’t expect all of them to bounce up and down about dinosaurs. But if they decide to do that, they will have my FULL SUPPORT).

So, yeah. Lab today was awesome. Oh, and I also told one of my students “I LOVE YOU,” because when I wrote “Thermus aquaticus” on the board, and asked them what I’d done wrong HE KNEW IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ITALICIZED OR UNDERLINED. I must be doing something right.

I had a really good day today (which was nice, because the previous two kinda sucked). A REALLY good day in various different ways. I taught my last two labs of the semester (that was the bittersweet part), I went to hear some music performed in the snazzy new music center on campus, and I was offered a position TAing a brand new science course which sounds SO AMAZING. This will probably ramble a bit, so …

On the one hand, I am quite glad that this semester is nearing an end. It was a good semester, but I always like the idea of winter break. 😀 But, at the same time, I will miss my students! I loved both of my lab sections, and today saying goodbye was a little bit sad. Especially for the evening lab – a bunch of them wanted hugs on the way out the door (yes, these are COLLEGE students), and several of them hung out a while after class was done just to chat about movies and video games and whatnot. They are all so very precious, and I love them, and it’s a bit sad for the semester to be over. But I’m sure I’ll love my students next semester, too.

Which leads me into the other REALLY COOL thing – I’ve been asked to TA a brand new class that has not been offered at our school before. It’s an inter-department course for students in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math), and it will be project-based. Basically, I’ll help them do individual projects, mostly dealing with a local watershed, and helping them come up with their own original research ideas. A lot of one-on-one interaction and mentoring, which I LOVE. And the idea of helping to shape the lab for this new course is also REALLY REALLY exciting. It means I’m going to have a busy semester (since I’ll still be teaching one lab section of my current course as well), but I think I’m going to really enjoy it. <3 Plus, since I’m really thinking about going into teaching full time when I’m done, this will be FANTASTIC experience for that. WHOO HOO!