Polishing That Resume

I was busy this week buffing up the resume credentials.

I am now certified to operate our forklift. I'm sure you are asking why I would ever need this skill. Well, we generate a fair bit of biological waste in the Necropsy unit, and we've got to dispose of it somehow. And "somehow" has to conform to an array of laws and regulations. We have a brand-new incinerator in a maintenance yard across the street from the lab, and we use the forklift to lift a specialized bag containing said biological waste out of a container and up into the incinerator. We typically burn between 1000 and 1500 lb of material at a time. That's not really a lot, since an average horse or cow weighs 1000 lb. Nobody at the lab was certified to run the forklift, so I arranged for the training and now 8 of us are certified. Plenty of hands to help whenever we need to burn a load of waste.

This week I also attended a day-long continuing education event on Arkansas aquaculture. I learned about the species that are cultivated in the state, and about important commercial fish diseases and parasites. After lunch, we had hands-on activities doing necropsies and looking over some lab testing procedures. I successfully pulled 3 mL of blood from my little catfish.
















The necropsy part was great. I knew absolutely nothing about fish anatomy before the class, and boy, are fish weird. There are only two chambers in their hearts, although they kind of cheat on the chamber count and add a third structure that acts as a pressure regulator out of the ventricle. They have two long kidneys tucked up near their spine like mammals. In some fish, the function of the cranial part of the kidney can be different than the posterior part. Their kidneys have an excretory function but freshwater fish lack the structures to create concentrated urine, for example. And of course they don't have lungs or a diaphragm. They have very simple guts, basically a stomach and intestine. I was surprised to learn that they do not have cloacas like birds but have two separate outlets, one for urogenital things and one for poop. Comparative anatomy for the win!