After transferring the fish earlier today, we just sat around until lunch time. After lunch, at around 1:30ish, we began our dissections. I joined Yinan and Urjeet in the aquarium room with dissecting some dead aceratus and some living juveniles. Since we only have so much counter space and so many knives, I was in charge of note-taking and prepping the cryopreservation vials (labeling, adding Bouin's solution to the vials that would receive a gonad sample, and adding ethanol to all other tissue samples). Doing it this way made everything happen at a much faster pace. In under two and a half hours we were able to dissect about 10 C. aceratus fish. We sampled the gonads, spleen, skeletal muscle, gill, and fin. We also filleted the fish, peeling off the skin so that they could be used for other biochemistry experiments further down the line. For our living juveniles, we first had to euthanize them in an MS-222 bath. It takes about five minutes for the fish to be ready to be processed. For those who are concerned, this is a humane/ethical way of killing the fish for scientific research purposes. It essentially gives them too much anesthesia. They aren't huge fans of the solution since it is a bit acidic, but it's a lot kinder than having them asphyxiate or just chopping off the head. Besides, we may need the head in tact.
After our dissections, I just went upstairs to upload a few more pictures to my Facebook album. I've been reading different news articles and whatnot too. It's a bit boring not having the option to stream movies through Netflix here. Since it's finals week, and more than likely nice outside back in Boston, my friends aren't online to chat either. Maybe I'll ask Urjeet and Yinan if they would like to go for a walk in the backyard of the station to see if we can spot any seals or penguins. Dinner isn't until 5:30 anyway.
As an aside about just living in Antarctica, the air here is extremely dry. Urjeet says that it's actually super humid and the humidity just sucks all the moisture out of our skin, but I don't know if I buy that. During the humid summer months in Boston, my skin doesn't become drier. In fact, if anything does happen at all, my skin becomes oilier. The only time I have dry skin is in the winter when we've gone weeks without significant precipitation. Anyway, the air here seems to just suck all moisture out of my body and skin. I'm drinking my normal amount of water (about 4-6L a day), but I'm still finding myself thirsty. My hands are also painfully chapped. At this point I'm thinking of just carrying around this 20% shea butter hand lotion I received before leaving the country. I could just apply it after every hand washing, every time I go outside, and every glove change. Maybe slap some vaseline on top of it too to trap the moisture on top of my skin, preventing it from evaporating into the air around me. Chapstick isn't helping me either. Just have to suck it up and try to do the best that I can I guess.
No comments:
Post a Comment