Today we had the privilege of Maria joining us for our marine biology course. We were lucky enough to be able to dissect a squid under her watchful eye. We worked in groups of 3 and my partners were Mike and William. The class had lots of fun identifying the parts of the squid and the first thing we did was to spread out all the tentacles equally. Once that was finished we had a look at the mantle and used a pair of scissors to cut it open and gaze at its insides. Once we saw their insides, we identified which one was a female and which one was a male. You can tell because the gonad of a female is see through and is kind of green while the male has a purely white gonad. There were 4 males and one female. After that, our next task was to remove the spine from the body. Mike took hold of the mantle and he teared it off from the rest of the insides, then I peeled off the spine and it was almost feather-like. We looked around and saw the ink sac, almost like tinfoil. William took the scissors and precisely cut a little bit off, we took it and put it to the side. Using the spine as a pen, we dipped it in the ink sac and began to write our names. Next was the sort of gory part. Mike held the squid by its head and cut a small hole inside its eye. We couldn’t find the lens, we were looking, but it wasn’t to be found. Soon enough, William heroically found it. I cut a hole in the second eye, squeezed it and a bunch of juice oozed out, but eventually we cleared through it when I found the second lens. At the end of the day we did a nice quiz, this showed us how much we had learned. I think everyone nearly aced this test and I think we did very well overall.
By Luke Higgins