Drawing blood

This week in lab we had the opportunity to help one of the resident researchers with his project. He is trying to learn more about Rockfish by drawing their blood and measuring heat shock proteins to see how warmer water temperatures will affect these fish.

We got to be a part of every step of the process from collecting the fish and anesthetizing them (a very interesting process to watch! They started out flopping wildly in the bucket but once the MS222 kicked in, they were floating belly up) then measuring and weighing them. We watched as he drew the blood from a vessel behind the anal fin, and it looked a lot more difficult then it would seem. After drawing the blood, we monitored the fish until it recovered (i.e., was not swimming upside down or running into the tank wall)

This was one of my favorite labs because it was so different. I had never really though that you could anesthetize and draw blood from fish. And it's amazing how much you can learn about these Rockfish just from this kind of data collection.

Hope to someday have the chance to draw blood from a fish myself.

Publicado el octubre 27, 2012 10:39 TARDE por laurenkay