Dissecting in Biology soon - Frogs skin?

go mike

go mike

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Dec 5, 2008
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In my biology class at school, we will be dissecting frogs soon. I would feel a little weird asking this, but should I try to get the frog skin for other makers? I don't know anything about frog skin, but I saw that some people use it in sheaths.
 
Mike...always giving! :) None for me, thanks, but I am interested in other peoples responses.

I remember the good ol' days of dissection. Let's see, for various classes I've dissected grasshoppers, crayfish, earthworms, blood worms, frogs, cats, cow eyeballs, sheep brains, sheep hearts, sharks, rays, fish, snakes, turtles, mice...probably missed a few. Oh, and I spent 10 weeks, 5 days a week, 3-4 hours a day in human cadaver dissection. Started with the whole body and ended up with a skeleton with a little bit of tissue on it. If it's in the human body I've seen it, smelled it, touched it, cut it (or around it), and held it. I wonder if I added up all the hours I spent in dissection if it would out-number the hours I've spent in knife making? :confused: Too many biology classes back when I was in school and not enough shop time now! ;)

Have fun. When it doubt, don't cut it.

--nathan
 
The rana pipiens used for school dissections is a different frog from the large tropical species used for frog skin leather. It probably wouldn't work well, even if you went to the trouble to tan it from a live frog. Formaldehyde preserved ( or whatever they use now) frogs would probably not work well at all.
Stacy
 
Hey Nathan I to have spent many hours in the cadaver lab. All of the bodies were treated with formaldehyde, man for months everything I eat, smelled and tasted was formaldehyde. Spent many hours on what we called picking and grinning, which removing all of the adipose tissure to see all of the other structures. Sorry back to the topic now. :)
 
Wade, I had a partner at the tank we nicknamed Fling. Because he was constantly accidentally flicking little pieces of fat while removing the adipose. One landed in my mouth one day, in fact :barf:. It didn't help that our cadavaer was a little (a lot) rotund and smelled really, really bad. Only one of the TA's would even come to our tank. They had stopped using formaldehyde when I was going through because of sensitization, so they used an alcohol based preservative which smelled even worse. Also, she was 85 and had died of pancreatic cancer and also had a huge old epidural bleed that had calcified. So she was probably very sednetary for a good portion of her life, so much so that you'd have a real difficult time differentiating muscle from connective and adipose tissue. It would just fall apart as you worked. It's amazing that I would be studying at night hours after leaving the lab, and all of the sudden a super strong whiff of gross anatomy would jump out of my sinuses to attack me. And I will never in all my days forget the smell and look of human fat. Oh the memories. :p

Sorry, I went WAY off topic. :)

--nathan
 
When I was in high school, the scalpels they gave us for for frog and fetal pig dissection were so dull I couldn't stand it. Recalling a scene from "The Outsiders" (or maybe it was one of the other novels by the same author), I whipped out my trusty Buck 110 and went to work. The teacher just told me to be careful, and "keep your knife in your pocket outside of class."

That was 25 years ago, in a small town... if a kid tried that now he'd probably get expelled or arrested. :rolleyes:
 
James_Terrio said:
When I was in high school, the scalpels they gave us for for frog and fetal pig dissection were so dull I couldn't stand it. Recalling a scene from "The Outsiders" (or maybe it was one of the other novels by the same author), I whipped out my trusty Buck 110 and went to work. The teacher just told me to be careful, and "keep your knife in your pocket outside of class."

That was 25 years ago, in a small town... if a kid tried that now he'd probably get expelled or arrested. :rolleyes:
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this year in fact we were in lab doing the stupid cow eyes. No I take that back I brought deer eyes from work fresh ones. The scalpels where so dull you could pick your nose with them. And the smoking hot teacher (i had to put that in there) was out of blades. So I said I had a knife,she says is it sharp I laughed and shaved my arm, And continued the disection.
 
Well this thread has taken an aroma that may keep me from sleeping for weeks. You guys are not the ordinary knife users.

BTW how is that stubborn belly fat attached? Why cant I get rid of mine?
 
hevy ev's said:
And the smoking hot teacher (i had to put that in there) was out of blades. So I said I had a knife,she says is it sharp I laughed and shaved my arm, And continued the disection.
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I'm surprised, but glad to hear there's still some sanity out there.

Now ya got me thinking about a couple of smokin hot teachers I had back in the day... if they'd been able to read my thoughts they would have never stopped slapping me... :D

Bruce Bump said:
You guys are not the ordinary knife users.
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Surely you didn't realize that just now. ;)
Sorry for the de-rail. :o
 
Bruce Bump said:
You guys are not the ordinary knife users.
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I am so sorry Bruce, I do not know why but for some reason I had thought you were smarter than that. :)

Nathan I could go back and forth with you on the lab tales all day. I had a friend that had started a year before me and he had filled me in on the details. So when the prof. turned us loose to pick out the body we wanted to work on I almost broke my neck getting to the lab. I went through all of them until I found the skinniest one. We named him Slim, how appropriate. :)
 
bladsmth said:
The rana pipiens used for school dissections is a different frog from the large tropical species used for frog skin leather. It probably wouldn't work well, even if you went to the trouble to tan it from a live frog. Formaldehyde preserved ( or whatever they use now) frogs would probably not work well at all.
Stacy
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Damn...is there anything he doesn't know? :)
 
Good call, Wade. We named ours Fatty Haddie. I don't miss it, but it was one of the best classes I took througout my grad work. I still think back to it in my practice on a daily basis.

Oh, and you med students who were TA's for us (we had 2nd year PT students and Med students as TA's) were the worst in tagging for lab practicals.

--nathan
 
God, I love the smell of formalin in the morning......
When I worked in pathology, back in 1967, there was a strange group of folks there. ( OK...strange even for people who hang around dead people and body parts). All nursing school students had to attend an autopsy ( That was as close to gross anatomy as they got). Dr. G would do the same thing every new batch. He would remove an organ, show it to them .....( a few would get pale).... set it in the pan,.... and (pretend to) lick his fingers. Two would faint, one would puke, and the rest were beating each other up to be the first out the door. I heard he did this for years until one Vietnam medic ,who was getting his nursing cert ,just stood there and asked, " What does it taste like?"

To make this a knife related post....
What I did in pathology/histology was the dessication, impregnation, and microtome sectioning of pathology specimens. One of the jobs was to sharpen the microtome blades. Now, you chaps like to talk about sharp...but these blades were SHARP. We are talking about making cut thicknesses in the four naught decimal range. Any sharper and it might have caused a nuclear explosion by splitting an atom.
Stacy


Djibouti ????,Hmmm..... Djibouti???, uhh........Ding, Ding, Ding...That is correct.
 
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Stacy the fainting part reminded me of one of my classmates. We were in gross anatomy and the prof was showing all the different muscle groups, so he bends down and grabs the cadavers penis and cuts it into to show what the cross section looks like. Well the guy and the end of the table just stood there and you could watch all the blood leave his face and him slowly just wither to the floor. We laughed so hard we all were crying. The prof. latter said that he always gets atleast one everytime he does that. If I mention that we had to sharpen the sissors after, does that make this knife related?
 
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