Dissection Day!

Hope everyone had a steady hand today in our fish dissection lab. We had rock fish on the cutting board, which was graciously donated by Local Oceans Seafood (best seafood in town). First we had to identify which species we had and then we got to dig in to identify the internal organs.

From the image above we can see the liver, heart, and intestines very clearly. The most interesting part of the dissection was retrieving the lens from the eye and two of the otoliths from the head. We can see these both in the image below with the lens on the bottom and otolith on the top.

Determining the sex of a dead fish is always exciting. We can tell this by removing the gonads and looking at the shape of them in a cross section. For males the cross section is triangular as opposed to females, which are more rounded. We can see an example of female gonads in the image below.

And of course we had to have some fun!