Final Blog

Final Blog: Reflect on your semester and year in biology. What were your successes? What were your failures? What did you learn that you will never forget?

              It's hard to believe that the year is almost over! 
                    This semester in biology was harder than the first semester, in my opinion. I had to work harder on my notebooks, we have a project right now in the making, and we had SEVEN dissections! This was really new for me because I've never done dissections in middle school and these dissections were my very first. Our first dissection of the worm, I felt nauseous and disgusted. However, after we continued doing more dissections, I got used to it, and I even dissected some species by myself. For example, I dissected the squid which had a lot of stuff inside of it and was slippery and smelled HORRIBLE. After we dissected it and cleaned it out, we fried the squid. I, of course, did not eat it. So, I think that one of my successes this year in biology was getting over my fear of dissections. Dissections are also something I will never forget. Once you get over the smell and disgusting aspects of dissections, it really isn't that bad; in fact, I had fun doing some of the dissections, and I learned a lot about  different species' organs and internal/external anatomy.
                       Furthermore, this year went by extremely fast. I was never exactly a fan of anything science related; but I did learn some new things this year in biology, mostly concerning animals and organ systems. For me, this is already a step up since science is a really hard subject for me and I do not seem to understand many things science-related- no matter how long I study.

Blog #15

Blog 15: Compare two of the organisms that we have dissected. Discuss at least 2 similarities and 3 differences.

           Two organisms we have dissected so far is the fish and the frog. They are similar because they must both keep their skin wet and moist to prevent them from drying out. Also, they both lay eggs and they both have gills. However, a frog only has gills while it's still a tadpole. Lastly, another similarity between these 2 species is that they both have darker dorsal surfaces and lighter ventral surfaces.

                 Although the fish and frog share many similarities, they also share many differences. Firstly, a frog is semi-aquatic while a fish is fully aquatic; a frog can live on both land and water, but a fish can only survive in water. Frogs are amphibious - they live in and out of the water. Fish can only live in the water; fish can only stay underwater with the help of gills to breathe and cannot come out of water due to the absence of a lung to help it breathe on land. Also, frogs have arms and legs and fish do not. Furthermore, fishes have scales and fins, both of which frogs do not have.

Blog 13

Blog 13: What was most interesting about this week's dissections?


The most interesting thing about this weeks dissections were all the different parts of the animals we dissected. For example, I never knew that an earthworm had a brain! I've never done dissections in elementary or middle school before, so pretty much everything was new to me. I learned a lot of the different parts and exterior and interior anatomy of the species we dissected: the earthworm, crayfish, fish, grasshopper, etc. In the beginning, I was disgusted and felt sick, but after more dissections I began getting more used to it and I actually was surprised that I learned so much from these animals. For example, when we dissected the fish, we had to take a fish scale and examine it under the microscope and it looked really interesting since we got the opportunity to really see how it looked like close up. From that, we found out that the fish was about 50 years old (in fish years).