Frog Legs

During finals week, one of my highlights was running a frog dissection as part of the Biology final exam. The week prior, my Chinese co-teacher went out to obtain specimens for the dissection; he came back with a large plastic bags of live frogs....from the grocery store.

(Some things are just easier in China!) We popped them in the fridge, and I brushed up on ways to humanely kill frogs.

The tricky part about that is, frogs are capable of surviving a lot.

Getting them cold doesn't kill them like it would a mammal. They simply wait it out until their body warms, and off they go. So, I had to learn how to destroy their brains and sever their spinal cords in order to be sure they were actually dead (and not going to "spring" back to life on the dissection table). It was a little gruesome and the city boy in me did not like it one bit.

But, the activity was a complete success, and the students learned a lot. There was only 1 needless decapitation and 0 resuscitated frogs, so I was happy. Next time though, I need to work this out with the cafeteria, so that they serve frogs legs for lunch that day :)

-alan