Mudpuppy dissection!

WARNING: The included pictures may be considered graphic or offensive by some.

You know what’s great about being hosted by a major newspaper like the Times Union? Last Wednesday I had 21 hits on my blog. A sad, lonely, 21 hits. Thursday, after being featured on the front page of the TU website brought me 536 hits. And today, 317 so far. That’s pretty awesome exposure for me. So, thanks for stopping by!

As I’ve mentioned in recent entries, I’m enrolled in a Herpetology course. Herpetology is a branch of zoology which focuses on the study of reptiles and amphibians. I’ve never been really into the “herps”, mammals and birds are more my forte in the world of wildlife, but I’m interested to know more about them. They are sensitive to environmental changes, they are abundant in New York (we have snakes, frogs, toads, salamanders, turtles, and lizards!), and they are fairly easy to come across. Especially in the few months as they are emerging from hibernation and beginning to breed.

Check out the NYSDEC’s website for

 more information: 

http://www.dec.ny.gov/animals/7485.html

The class is 4 hours long: 2 hours of lecture, 2 hours of lab. Friday’s lab was really fun for me, as we did a dissection of a mudpuppy! Mudpuppies are large salamanders that spend all of their time in fresh water. They have external gills, and can be found all over New York State. The only time I’ve seen one in the wild was while using a “gill net” (a type of sampling equipment for fish) in the middle of Canandaigua Lake in late May. They’re really cool!

The following pictures are kind of a walk through how my group conducted our dissection. The mudpuppies that we had to dissect came from Ward’s Natural Sciences, which is located in Rochester, NY. These animals were raised in captivity and then humanely euthanized for educational purposes. This is also true for the rats, frogs, pigs, etc that we’ve all dissected in general biology courses.

Our mudpuppy of choice!

Before cutting into our mudpuppy, Dr. Losito wanted us to do an external examination of the cloaca. All herps have only one opening for defecating, urinating, and reproduction. That’s what you see here. The males are supposed to be very puffy and swollen looking, and to us, this looked that way. We would receive our definitive answer once we cut it open.

Upon cutting it open, we immediately saw the ovary, which are those small yellowish balls.

Photo credit to lab partner: 

Lauren Richardson

Depending on the sex of our mudpuppy, Dr. Losito wanted us to follow and identify all digestive organs, and then the reproductive system. The digestive system was laying on top of the reproductive organs, so we had to get through that first!


The path of digestion is as follows: mouth > esophagus > stomach > duodenum (which contains the pancreas which creates insulin) > small intestine (nutrient absorption) > large intestine (water absorption) > colon > excretion through the vent.

We also identified the lungs, spleen, liver, gall bladder, and urinary bladder.The digestive organs that we identified include: ostium, oviduct, ovary, and the archinephric duct. Our female was considered “gravid”, because she was full of eggs. Other groups also had females that showed these parts, but the body cavity was not nearly as full as ours was.

Below my lab partners Lauren Richardson and Chelsea Gendreau are trying to sort through organs so that we can find everything. In the picture below that, you can see a nice upclose picture of what a truly gravid female mudpuppy looks like.

Lauren (L) and Chelsea (R) examine our mudpuppy.

 

A gravid, female mudpuppy.

A final shot: mudpuppy skin is full of mucous ducts that keep the skin moist and lubricated for water travel. They’re not scaly, but feel like frogs. They are really cool animals, and ARE found in NY, so if you’re lucky enough to see one (or catch one while fishing) consider yourself lucky!

I hope you enjoyed this brief entry, and I’m glad I got to finally post a longer entry sharing what I get to do in school. This is my LAST semester of my undergrad! I couldn’t be more happy, but I’m also a little nervous. Wish me luck this last semester and while I continue on this job hunt!

My first experience with taxidermy...

I’m warning you now- this is going to be a gross entry for some.

As a SUNY Cobleskill Wildlife Management major, the majority of my classes are very hands on. Our professor’s strive to prepare us “for the field” and the goal is to be “job ready” when we graduate. I’m currently enrolled in Dr. Losito’s Ornithology course. Ornithology: the study of birds.

Among learning approximately 150 bird species by sight and sound, I’ve learned general internal and external bird anatomy. My most recent project for this course was to prepare a study skin of a European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris).

The European Starling, as you may gather from it’s name, is not from North America.

A flock of starlings take off over garbage at the

Rapp Road Landfill in Albany, NY on January 20, 2011.

Photo credit: Lori Van Buren / Times Union

According to the All About Birds website, these birds were brought to this continent in the late 19th century, and only 100 birds were released in Central Park in NYC. As many introduced species go, they quickly take off and become invasive. There are an estimated 200 million now in North America ranging from Mexico to Alaska. Starlings are extremely adaptable, and in turn invasive. Thus, they are unprotected by NYS Fish and Wildlife Law. What that means is that you can harvest (shoot, poison, trap, etc) as many as you want, whenever you want. Part of their natural history is to gather in large flocks, often in the company of other “black birds” (Grackles, Red-winged Blackbirds).

The flocks can blacken the sky.

Each Ornithology student was given a Starling as their specimen to prepare. I suppose preparing the specimen could be considered taxidermy, but I want to make clear that I didn’t mount this Starling in a majestic pose with a snarl on it’s beak :) That’s left for more impressive animals like cougars and monstrous bucks.

Ok, now is when you want to stop reading of you are a little squeamish!

Ready to go: Starling and my dissection kit

So basically, what I had to do was remove the entire “innards” of the bird. Not just guts, but the entire inside. It was like unzipping it’s little “bird suit” and removing it’s coat.

Also, do I need to mention that this bird was already dead? I didn’t kill it, it was given to me frozen. A large nuisance flock was captured and gassed with CO2 to kill them. Instead of the birds going to waste, they were given to my college so that students could learn from them.

The first cut.

I have a brand new, very sharp dissection kit. I think this is essential when doing any kind of dissection or skinning. Although it seems counter-intuitive that you’d be safer with sharper tools, you’d be less likely to slip, and your cuts will be more accurate.

Severed leg bone from hip joint.

After the initial incision, I had to take a probe and well…probe around in the body cavity. There is a thin membrane between the skin and the organs that I needed to unattach. I worked towards both hip joints and “shoulder” joints at the wings. I had to sever these, so I could remove the body from inside the skin.

The goal was to have what looks like a mini turkey carcass, and a seperated loose starling skin which I would then stuff with cotton to restore the shape of the bird. Everyone knows what a Thanksgiving bird looks like, right? This was the miniature version!

Cotton on the severed ends of the humerus bones of the wing.

After severing and cleaning the tissue off both the legs, I worked my way up to the wings. In the picture you can see the cotton I used to replace the muscle mass of the upper wings that I removed. Without it, the wing may look deflated. With too much, I’d have a Popeye bird. Then the tips needed to be tied together so that when the bird was stitched back up, the wings didn't hang too loosely.

Cotton stuffing fills the skull cavity to maintain the shape of the bird's head.

I’ll spare the readers of this entry most of the gory details when it came to working on the head. It was disgusting. As I mentioned above, while I was removing the eyeballs (think size, color, shape, and consistency of blueberries- not fresh ones, but maybe frozen then thawed- a little loose in their skin), one POPPED and got onto my face and all up my arm. I had to walk away and take the dog outside for some fresh air.

I recovered, and was able to continue. Once all of the soft tissue was removed from the bird’s skull cavity, I stuffed it with cotton to maintain the shape of the head. I also removed the back half of the skull to have easier access to the “insides”. Also at the base of the skull I made a cut and officially freed the little “turkey carcass”, so now I had a limp Starling skin. Imagine taking the beans out of a Beanie Baby.

A Starling popsicle!

I also should mention that while I was working, I used corn meal and Borax to help preserve the specimen. Corn meal works great to soak up any moisture, although there wasn’t much. And the Borax helps to preserve the tissue that is left behind.

Once I got it all out, I had to reform the bird. I used the cotton, and wrapped it around a wooden stick. I had to play with it a bit, but I threaded the stick up through the neck (on the inside of the bird) and lodged the sharpened tip in the nasal cavity. The rest of the stick was wrapped with cotton, and I had to adjust it here or there to make sure the bird didn’t look lumpy.

After a bit of maneuvering, I was satisfied with how the bird looked, and stitched it up! Remember I had made the original incision that was a few inches long. It was recommended that we only needed 3-4 stitches, but I needed more. For my first time though, I think I did pretty well!

When I took this picture, I didn't realize the 'Peanut Gallery' was watching from below!

This is my finished bird! You can barely tell that moments before, this bird was excavated and inside out! I think I did a pretty neat job for my first time. I also preened the feathers a bit to make them lay flat and “natural”.

To secure the legs, I crossed them and tied them around the stick and I’m done!

These types of specimens are considered “museum specimens”. They aren’t the ones you’d see in a display case, but each museum, especially a natural history museum, has collections that aren’t on display. Museums are places where things are stored to preserve history and in this case, wildlife species are kept for documentation purposes.

The identification tag.

The last piece, and probably just as important as the bird itself, is some way to identify the species. Who knows, in 200 years maybe all European Starlings will be wiped out from New York. Without telling when, where, what this bird is- no one would have a clue as to what it is!

So in hindsight, it was not a HORRIBLE assignment, but I won’t be making a hobby of preserving dead animals either. Unless I’m really bored. I think that taxidermy is an art, and for those who take hunted animals and make them look realistic in dramatic poses- I respect that. I’m turning in my bird tomorrow, and I really hope that I did well. I do NOT want to have to redo this assigment! Once was enough for this girl.

River Otter Dissection

Last weekend (September 28-29-30, 2012) I travelled back west to the Finger Lakes region to visit my family and some old classmates and professors. A class I took 2 years ago, in the fall of 2010, was in progress that weekend at FLCC's Muller Field Station on the South end of Honeoye Lake.

Muller Field Station - 9/29/2012

The class, Wetland Mammals, is taught by Professor John Van Niel, and Conservation Tech Sasha Mackenzie. It's taught over 2 weekends, where the class eats, sleeps, and learns at the field station. I believe there are also some meeting times outside of those weekends in the traditional classroom. All in all, it ends up to 3 credits worth of face time with John and Sasha, and one of the best classes I've taken yet. And I took it the first round, when they were still figuring out how to run the course...I could tell this past weekend they really had established the class and articulated what they expected from their students.

I was barely able to contain my jealousy, I'm not sure those FLCC students realize how lucky they are to have classes like this available to them! :)

The part I wanted to blog about from my experience hanging out with them for the day on Saturday (9/29/12), was the river otter dissection I got to watch. The NYS Department of Environmental Conservation Region 8 Furbearer Biologist, Scott Smith, came to guest speak on the ins and outs of trapping in New York. I first met Scott when I was a student in this course, and have since gotten to work with him a couple times (Honeoye Fur Auction). He's a great biologist, down to earth, and really willing to talk about his job. He's great addition to the course.

 

Scott ran through different types of traps, methods of making a set, using scent lures, the biology of how the animals actually die (FYI, it's not drowning, it's high levels of CO2 in the blood stream), and set them all up so we could see how it was done. He explained the necessity of trapping: I am not a hunter or a trapper, but I realize the importance of these methods of harvest for managing these species of wildlife.

Scott also brought with him some road-killed specimens of interest. It's great for FLCC's conservation faculty and staff and the local DEC biologists to have such a close relationship. The students get to totally take advantage of that relationship and shadow the biologists, and also get cool presents like dead beavers, bobcats and otters delivered to them in class!

Sasha and student Rodney checking out the beaver.

Bobcat

...and student Luke with the river otter (and a couple of really excited classmates behind him)!

A side note before I talk about the dissection:

One of these is the tail of the beaver, and one is the sole of a porcupine foot.

Both have similar textures, and are REALLY cool! Glad I got the check them out.

(The porcupine picture was from the Porcupine Paws entry I wrote recently..)

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 **WARNING**

The following pictures will be increasignly gory.

If you have a weak stomach, please don't continue.

This otter was killed by a car, retrieved by the DEC and saved for educational use. It's opportunities like this that allow students an up-close chance to appreciate a rare, BEAUTIFUL animal that's slowly making it's way back up in numbers.

 

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So Scott took the otter, and strung it up by a foot for easy access and leverage while skinning.

 

 

Once he made it down the tail, around the ankles, and around the vent, it was just like "pulling a sweatshirt off"...gross, but I guess true. An analogy we could all relate to :)

On one leg, he found these parasites. I don't know what they were, but it seemed very strange to me that they were between the skin and muscle. I would expect to find them in the organs, but Scott seemed unsurprised.

 

Once the skin was totally removed (it was going to be saved, tanned, and used as an educational skin), we moved the group outdoors. A naked, dead, thawing river otter smells a bit...ripe...and we needed that fresh air.

 

Scott took the lead on the dissection, with John as back up...and as you'll see in a few pictures, a ton of student help as well!

 

Working up the animal: I thought these round, bulbous features were testicles, making this a male otter. WRONG, these are scent glands. Otters are in the Mustelidae family, along with weasels, mink, fisher, badger, and wolverine. All are stinky critters, and possess this scent gland. Both males and females have these glands, and this, by the way is a female!

 

Scott cut through the sternum and through the diaphragm to expose the internal organs.

 

Kidney(s?)...very different than what we "know" kidneys to look like. This is was all segmented and in one group, rather than separated into 2 halves.

The heart- we all agreed it seemed relatively large for the size of the animal. A human heart is about the size of our fist, right? Well I imagine if this otter made an adorable little fist with it's paw, this heart would easily be twice as large.

Gall bladder- full of bile, which is apparent because of the color of the organ.

We had a visiting professor, Lisa Tracy (North Hennepin Community College, MN) with us for the weekend, a professor of biology, who had a lot to share. It was really neat to have John (the wildlife educator), Scott (the practicing biologist), and then Lisa (the lab biology educator) all on the panel dissecting the otter. Having taken this class 2 years ago, and watching John go through this alone, I had something to compare to. Lisa talked a bit about function of the parts, and how they connect.

 

THEN...they took the large intestine and stretched it out. This picture only shows part of the students holding it. To my left there were 2-3 other people standing, stretching the organ out. It was REALLY impressive!

OK, this is the part that got me and made me walk away for a minute.

They began squeezing the contents of the intestine out. Along the way were various levels of digested food matter. Otters eat fish and small invertebrates, which stink on their own. This was truly a smell to behold in person. I'm sorry I can't convey it through my blog.

Jackie sorted through a bit of the "scat", and found these indigestible parts. There's a bone there on the right sticking up, and the thing in the middle looks like part of some kind of carapace. Belonging to perhaps an insect or maybe a crayfish?

It was really cool to see all the hands in on the dissection. Morbidly, it was like kids and play-dough! I love this kind of learning, and haven't really had the opportunity to "get dirty" yet here at Cobleskill. I know it's gross to look at, but for people like us who want to learn to be biologists, this is a golden opportunity.

 

 

 

That pretty much ends the dissection, and I walked away shortly after the squeezing of the intestines. I'm pretty tough, and can handle doing this kind of stuff. But the smell was a little overwhelming, kudos to those who stuck it out!

 

 

I miss this place, but I must move on for now!

And come back to visit as often as I can.

Thanks to John and Sasha for letting me hang out for the day!

 

Happy 100th Post to ME!

I feel like I should write something extra super-duper special for my 100th posting, and I wish I had amazing camera trap pics to share for this occasion. Unfortunately my Cuddeback Attack Flash has been misbehaving and not performing as I've come to expect from Cuddeback products! I have managed to get ONE picture of a wild critter here, a first for me, but not as glamorous as one would expect of Alaskan wildlife.

Snowshoe hares

Tomorrow I'm mailing my camera back to Cuddeback to be fixed or replaced. It's aggravating because I have bears and moose and lynx and wolves literally running through my backyard and I want to see them!

Anyway, what this post is actually about is the dissection of pink salmon (humpies) that I was able to participate in with local K-4th graders.

**WARNING**

This is another gory posting!

These salmon were collected by the state of Alaska (Alaska Department of Fish and Game, like the NYSDEC), and deemed for whatever reason for educational use only. So Cheryl (Fish Biologist who specializes in Conservation and Outreach) and I packed up 12 salmon, dissection equipment and headed for a local school. K-12 students have been out for summer vacation since before Memorial Day here, so the students we were working with were in a summer school program.

Our setup...a nice mild breezy day outside is always nice for a fish dissection!

A female pink salmon

First Cheryl or I would cut the fish down the belly from right under the gills to the vent...this was before the kids came outside. The dissection was done by hand, once we slit the fish open.

Inside a female...check out the eggs! I think I was more excited than some of the kids. They've grown up cleaning salmon, but I've never experiences it. Way cool!

Eggs or roe

On the left: liver

On the right: Milt sacs (sperm)

Stomach and small/large intestines

Heart

Swim bladder...the fish can control how much/little air is in this organ to move it through the water column! So cool to see...and we were able to pull this one out and look at it. It looked like a balloon..to the kids, haha!

Swim bladder

And NOW for a bit of education :)

Anadromous: a fish (salmon specificall) that is born into freshwater, migrates to salt water where it spends the majority of its life, and swims a final migration back to its birthplace in freshwater where it will spawn, and then die.

These fish will undergo a secondary sexual morph when they re-enter freshwater for the final stage of life. Often in the ocean, they pretty much look like silvery fish...individual species are identifiable, but they look very similar. But when they start to move upstream, they take on color changes and even the males will turn into montrous looking creatures. Below are pictures of some physical changes the pinks go through.

Female pink: not sure of the changes she goes through on the outside. Due to my minimal knowledge of salmon and fish in general, I think that this is what she will probably look like her whole life.

The males on the other hand, will at one point, look similar to the female above. But once they hit the freshwater they start to morph. They will often "darken" in color: taken on a pinkish hue and some watermarking. I hope to have examples of this later in the season with FRESH fish...these were all frozen. But I think the most marked change is that face. They will develop a kype, which is a pronounced curvature of the jaw. It, I suppose, is supposed to look "sexy" to the ladies. The teeth develop more and lengthen, although once the salmon hit freshwater they stop eating. The pink salmon males will also develop this huge hump on the back posterior to the dorsal fin. This one didn't really have one- I think he was taken early in the spawning season. Below is a picture of what they will eventually look like.

NOAA Fisheries Image Gallery

That was a really fun day with the kids. I love doing that stuff, not only working with children, but dissections are great! They can be gross (I did have to walk away at one point, after watching a kid gouge out the eyes with his bare hands), but such a great learning experience. I think I got just as much out of it as they did!