Elective Spotlight: Zoology
By Kamyrn Simcox
Just another day in the lab they thought, but that’s not at all what it was. Junior, Allyssa Camara, and sophomores, Aisling O’donnell and Sarah Rossi, were in zoology class and were told they were dissecting an earthworm. Usually earthworms tend to be smaller, but in this case these worms were almost a foot long. With dissecting comes preparation because these worms are so fragile and skinny that too deep of a cut could mess up the whole stomach and they’d all fail the lab. Camara was the person who collected data and answered the questions on the lab paper.” When I found out we were dissecting a worm I was grossed out but also intrigued and to prepare we had a pre-lab to complete with a diagram of the worm so we knew where everything was,” Camara said. When you do any activity you must follow the steps and read each step to make sure it is executed correctly.
O’Donnell was the person who was folding the worm over and then pinned it so the group could continue to dissect and locate the different parts of the worm. “The pre lab worksheet and Mrs. Collins helped out a lot with telling me where to pin and locating all the different parts and what their functions were,” O’Donnell said. “ I thought dissecting it was going to smell bad and I thought it would be gross but it wasn’t too bad,” O’Donnell said.
Rossi was the one in the group who had to make that very precise and first initial cut into the earthworm. Rossi had the most stressful part of the dissecting that day and was informed that if anyone was to cut it too deep into the worm it would destroy the insides including the crop which is part of the stomach, the aortic arch, all the reproductive parts and others. “I was grossed out and excited to dissect a worm because it was very different from our last dissection of a type of clam. I knew I had a stressful task of cutting the worm because cutting too deep would cause the intestines to come out and ruin the project. The worst part of it was when I had to cut all the way up by the head and the mouth, it was super gross, but our teacher was a great help and we had a directions sheet,” Rossi said.