My Skeleton Work (WARNING! Dead animals and high res photos)
- Thread starter BioHazard
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Lupin
Registered Member
- Sep 21, 2006
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- Real Name
- Paul
Never tried to do something like that but the gourami's shape tells me it may be a giant gourami although I've never seen the teeth at all. I've never ventured beyond this and fisheries would have been my preferred profession but I got it sidetracked as the university offering this course is very far so it was a no go.
I really don't know what kind of gourami it was... we don't even know where it came from. I guess some Prof owned it, but decided they didn't want it, so they dumped it into one of the tanks we have running at the university with goldfish and elodea. They use the goldfish to look at bloodflow (if you look at a fin under a scope, you can see the blood moving through the veins), and the elodea for plasmolysis(you can see the cells in elodea plants really well, and when you add a salt solution, the cells retract from the cell wall, called plasmolysis). Unfortunately, it wasn't well cared for here either, and since it was in a room that was usually locked, there wasn't much I could do...
It does have impressive teeth though! I wouldn't want to be bitten by one of these guys. I'd love to get some more fish, this is the only one I have. Mostly, I have birds, since the Prof I'm working with is an ornithologist (Bird studier). The next thing I have the most of is small rodents, which my cat and other Profs cats keep in steady supply.
That really is kinda cool.
I wish I could chemical-ize things down to the bone.
Side note:
I just thought of the coolest art idea ever...
Skeleton tank.
Have normal community fish skeletons hung in a tank...
Crrreeepy.
I wish I could chemical-ize things down to the bone.
Side note:
I just thought of the coolest art idea ever...
Skeleton tank.
Have normal community fish skeletons hung in a tank...
Crrreeepy.
Woah... that would be creepy! You could bring it out around halloween to freak people out. If you ever want to skeletonize something, it's not that hard, just time consuming. Before I had beetles at the school, I would macerate skulls for my own collection. You just mix up some ammonium hydroxide (lots of water mixed with a little bit of ammonia), put the skull in and let it sit outside in the warm sun for months. Bacteria colonize it and break down the flesh, and you take it out every week or so, scrub the skull a bit to remove loose stuff, and put it back in. You also change the water when it gets too cloudy. This is slow, smelly and tedious though. Also, you can't do anything too delicate, because it will fall apart. If you want dermestids, just look for some oldish roadkill. Put the beetles in a tank with some dirt and mulch and catfood (for food when there is no specimens). When you are done skeletonizing, set them free.
kjr928
Go fish yourself.
Actually, the odor isn't too bad. The room has no smell at all, and it helps that we have it under a fume hood with the fans on. The fume hood sucks the air up in the tank and spits it outside. The tank odor varies. When a fresh specimen is in, it can get a little stinky, but only when I have my face directly over it. The ammonia jars are the worst. The smell of rancid fat and decay running down the sink is enough to turn even my stomach!
The hawk in there actually smelled really bad, due to a freezer failure. We had a bunch of specimens in a freezer that quit working... the door popped open from all the decay fumes. When I started prepping the hawk, I had to open the door of the lab room to breathe. I could hear people walking by, and when they got near, I could hear the explatives! It was funny, once I got used to the smell. For the rest of the day, the whole hall smelled terribel. The hawk was really rotten, some of the muscles had actually turned green. :barf: The gourami also stank.
Very cool - I helped my friend gut and skin his dead pet iguana in college, he did the same kind of thing, independent study with a professor using these beetles. So do you reconstruct the skeletons and mount them? Or do they just sit in the boxes?
