Second Week

Early in the week things in my lab slowed down a bit. On Tuesday, most of the people who work in my lab left for Virginia to collect more fish so I had a shorter day in lab. Wednesday though, work picked up again. After doing the usual work in the lab, dosing eggs with different PAHs and looking at eggs that had been dosed a few days before, we ended the day by dissecting the fish that had brought in Tuesday night. This had to be done almost immediately after the fish were brought in so they wouldn't be given a chance to flush out the chemicals in their system that we were testing for. Five of us in the lab set up an assembly line to disect the fish. I was at the very beginning. After taking them out of their tank I put the fish in ice cold water. Usually when putting the fish to sleep they use an anesthetic but this time we couldn't as it might interfere with the chemicals already present in their system. Since fish are cold-blooded, the cold water slowed them down so they wouldn't move, but were still alive so we could take blood (which needs the heart to be pumping). My other job was doing the blood smears after Cole had drawn their blood.

We disecting fish on Wednesday and Thursday morning as well. Thursday I got to see what the fish looked like once they'd cut it open to look at the liver, heart and other organs. It was fascinating, even after the fish had been dead for a few minutes, you could still see heart pumping.

Thursday afternoon and Friday I did more typical work in the lab. We looked at fish embryos under the microscope and judged their heart development after they had been induced with different chemicals. I also spawned fish again and screened the eggs, pulling out the good ones to use in my experiment. Friday afternoon I dosed those eggs, and tomorrow, Monday, I'll get to look at their development.