Well, from what I've done with dissecting things, you're pretty much doing it to learn about the creature's anatomy. We'd try to make fairly precise incisions and avoid damaging anything whenever it was possible, and then we would take each organ or tissue sample and record information on it. After writing everything down we'd make sketches of them if we had the time, and sometimes if the animal was big [like sharks, cats, pigs, etc etc] enough we'd be tasked with putting everything back to its proper place and sewing everything back together.
I dissected an earthworm today. Then I had lunch.
And no, my lunch was not the earthworm.
Looking for some stories?How do you kill cleanly an earthworm without damaging its body too much?
Putting it in an oxigen-free environment for a while should work, perhaps; but perhaps there are better methods...
edited 11th May '12 5:20:26 AM by Carciofus
But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.Well, I don't really plan to do it myself.
I was just wondering what people who dissect earthworms or other small invertebrates do in order to avoid damaging the specimen too much.
edited 11th May '12 8:20:44 AM by Carciofus
But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.When I prepped different invertebrates for dissection, insets and spiders went into a glass jar with a cotton ball soaked in ether, and aquatic invertebrates were fixed in a ~35% methanol/water solution. Not sure how they kill earthworms, all the ones I dissected were provided by the supply company.
Well, I never dissected any worms, just looked at them under the microscope. But when we were collecting worms for our parasite collection, they advised us to put them in a 70% ethanol solution (I think it was 70%, but I could be misremembering) or put them in the freezer to kill them first.
I understand some maggots are very good at closing off their bodies to survive in unpleasant environments though.
Once I tried to freeze a fly to humanely kill it for that collection. It revived from apparent death like three times -_-
Be not afraid...

Is there a difference between dissection and skinning/cleaning game? Because I've not done dissections (due to all the schools I've been to being too poor to afford it), but I've cleaned animals before.
"I don't know how I do it. I'm like the Mr. Bean of sex." -Drunkscriblerian