We had great fun in the laboratory this afternoon. It's surprising how much entertainment you can get from dissecting mussels. Despite having rudimentary dissection gear, the students managed not only to remove the gills but also slip them onto slides for examination under the microscope. Okay, it doesn't sound like much but this were fresh specimens not fixed and preserved material. The gills were horrible to manipulate—they tore and ruptured, creased and folded—but the students got enough tissue to look at the gross and fine anatomy.
If I get some time tomorrow, I'll do a (quick) dissection and take some photos to post here. After all, every blog needs an image or two of a dissected mussel ...
