Spring is here in the Pacific Northwest. I'm sure that is of no consolation to the folks around the world still buried under ice and snow. Still, beautiful sunny days interspersed with gray rainy ones are a combustible combination for all the growing, budding, and flowering things. I've mowed the lawn once and it already needs to be mowed again. My metric for mowing is when the grass reaches Mimi's belly. She doesn't like wading through it to find the perfect pee spot. Yes, she is a princess. Yes, I spoil her terribly. (Example: I bought a new wide recliner, nice brown leather, over the winter holidays just so I'd have enough room for her by my side without being crowded.)
The spring weather is making it hard to sit inside and study for hours and hours as we prepare our end-of-term projects and get ready for finals. I once again took a heavy course load this term but only have two finals late next week. I had several significant projects that I wrapped up last week.
I mentioned before about the cats that we dissected in anatomy lab. For the final project of that class, we had to dissect another animal with the goal of examining specific adaptations then prepare and deliver a presentation on what we learned. There was also some literature work involved.
I was amazed when the lab instructor spent some time discussing what peer-reviewed, primary literature was; she even followed up with a handout. It's a sad commentary when a 20-year-old science major thinks that Wikipedia or JimBob's Big Website o' Facts According to JimBob are valid resources. Hey, do not mistake me here. I often use Wikipedia as a starting point, to get familiar with terminology that I can use when searching legitimate databases. But I would never think of citing it as a source!
The group of animals from which we could select our final project was diverse: a couple of gulls, a heron, a horned owl, a barn owl, a nutria and a beaver, and two large squirrels. A sea turtle showed up from the marine observatory associated with the university. The bird-heavy list is due to donations from the wildlife rehabilitation facility north of town; they receive far more birds there than anything else. I briefly considered the nutria but a quick half an hour's research suggested that they weren't that interesting. I never for a moment considered the beaver or the sea turtle. Too large, too complicated, and the professor wanted both dissections done in such a way as to protect various components for preservation and mounting as both were unusual acquisitions. I was enjoying the class but didn't want a final project that was going to be so time-consuming that it would interfere with my other classwork.
My first choice was the barn owl. After a number draw, me and a guy named Mike got the barn owl. We were very pleased! We worked well as a team. Our final presentation was extremely dense with all sorts of cool things we learned about barn owls in general and our barn owl in particular. It was a great project. I covered the phylogeny of owls (morphology and genetics) as well as feather structure and wing adaptions that allow barn owls to fly slow and quietly (getting into physics of flight). My partner covered ear, eye, facial ruff, and hind limb adaptations that allow barn owls to hunt so successfully in low-light conditions. We had the research and the dissection done in about two weeks, spent a weekend working on the presentation, and delivered it on Friday. Efficient and targeted, just like a barn owl!
The anatomy class attracts students from both zoology and animal sciences departments. Three of the women in the class are animal science majors, farm girls who want to work with production animals. They weren't happy with the available animal selection. Instead, one of them used some connections to get her hands on a few-days-old Holstein calf who had died. It was stashed in a freezer up at the vet school. They decided that they were going to dissect this calf. Holsteins, as you might know, are large animals. This calf already weighed well over 100 lbs. It was the size of a person. It arrived frozen solid in an enormous black plastic trashbag; it took days to defrost. They managed to skin it before deciding that when it came to getting into its innards, they were going to be dealing with a fluid volume issue that our lab wasn't really equipped to handle. (The turtle team had similar problems but the turtle shell acted as a basin; they tipped the accumulated turtle juice into the sink in the lab a few times each session.)
Now I know that understanding the workings of production animals is pretty important to the health of those animals and to the health of those who eat their parts. But I had to shake my head over their choice: next to dogs, cows are one of the most genetically manipulated animals that we use. Adaptations in a calf were going to be related to its fundamental nature as a ruminant but I couldn't help feeling that those were pretty mundane compared to the more exotic adaptations in the turtle or the barn owl.
But the calf group's story got even odder. Once they decided that the Holstein wasn't going to work, one of the group quickly identified a replacement: a still-born Jersey calf, one of a pair of twins, that was lying in a field outside town. By the time they got the Jersey into the lab, it had been lying in the field for days. It was covered with mud and debris from the ground and it smelled exactly like hamburger meat that has gone off, way off. It was certainly gag-inducing (I'm glad I no longer eat beef). By this time, most of the other groups except for the turtle and beaver teams had completed their dissections. The calf group was just getting started. I have no idea if they ever finished either calf beyond skinning them.
I firmly believe that your educational experiences are what you make of them. And to their credit, the calf group stuck with their decision. I hope they learned valuable things. But I also believe that you have to find a balance between competing tasks and responsibilities. Just because it's spring time and I want to be working in the yard doesn't mean I can ditch all the other things I need to do as well. Dissecting a calf probably seemed like a good idea at the time but sometimes you have to look at the bigger picture.
No comments:
Post a Comment