Warning to the squeamish - There are some fish organs posted in today's journal. If you don't want to see what is inside of a fish don't look inside of this journal.
Now, some of you have requested to see what goes on inside the fish so let's take a look. We have dissected some Notothenia coriiceps so far.
Here are some of the Notothenia coriiceps that we caught on our first fishing trip.
I have to warn you I am not an expert on the anatomy but I can tell what things are. This first picture is the brain. What struck me about it was how white it was. Human brains are a bit grey and pink. This brain is also quite small in proportion to the animal.
This is the brain of the N. coriiceps. As you can see it is separated in lobes and it is also very small.
Many of the fish we have dissected had parasites in their livers. This is really common. One question I had was how does this affect the fish or if there is any benefit to the fish (not likely). Some had A LOT of these parasites.
This fish had parasites in its liver. The thicker tubular organ is part of the intestines. photo courtesy of Steven Untracht.
This fish had a lot of parasites. We can't use their liver to get data when they are infested as that would taint the information we get.
The doctor on the station, Steven Untracht, has been very interested and as well as helpful. He also took a number of these pictures. He's a surgeon and was very interested in our experiments. He supplied the iSTAT and the cartridges for looking at the blood that I talked about in yesterday's journal. Don't worry, there are plenty of supplies available for the human patients should he need them.
Here is Dr. Steve scanning the supplies that he is letting us use. All supplies are carefully kept track of and logged. When you are far from everything we have to know exactly what we have, especially medical supplies!
I'll show you a male and a female fish. From the outside you can't really tell the females from the males. Once you get inside it is really obvious. Sometimes you can make a pretty good guess about which fish are female when they are gravid. That means fertile and full of eggs to be laid. They are very thick around the middle, like being pregnant.
This is a female. In the lower right hand corner are the gonads. In females those are the ovaries where the eggs are. These ovaries are really full of eggs as you can see. The gills are in the upper left.
The gills are so beautiful and intricate. The digestive tract has much of the same organs that we have. Take a look.
Here are some of the digestive organs in the female. The real dark thing is the spleen. Directly to the right of it is part of the intestines. The greenish thing on the left of it is the gall bladder. Next to the gall bladder is the stomach. Photo courtesy of Steven Untracht.
Here is a picture of the inside of a male fish. That great big white structure is one of the testes - the male gonad that carries the sperm to fertilize the females eggs when she lays them.
This is a male fish. The white structure is a gonad. There are two of these in the fish. To the left of this is part of the intestines. Photo courtesy of Steven Untracht.
So that gives you an idea of what is inside. It's not everything but it is the main structures. We didn't have much time to take pictures as we had to harvest the tissues as quickly as we could so they can be frozen for later analysis. The heart has already been removed. This needs to come out quickly after the fish dies and frozen so the tissues can be preserved for analysis back in the States. I will post a picture the heart of a redblooded fish and some icefishes very soon. You can compare them. You'll see a big difference in them. Any guesses what those differences will be?
My question for today is...when do you say fish and when do you say fishes? The answer is trickier than you might think.