Dylan Radford, UR- Fish Guts!

Fish Guts!

Fish Otolith Graph

This past week in class was pretty awesome if I had to say. The class and I got a chance to extract otoliths from fish that were already dead. an otolith is basically a bone near the fish gills that can be taken out to measure their age. At first when I was told that we would be doing this I was pretty nervous because I have never dissected a fish before or anything for that matter. As I started working on my first fish, I couldn't fin the otolith so our instructor came over to help me. She made it look so simple. There was a bone that I needed to crush to get to the otolith and I couldn't get it. After I was finally able to crack it, I cracked it too much and snapped the otolith into pieces so I had to get a new fish. After a few trial and error situations I finally got my fish otolith! It looked awesome, mostly because I extracted it myself, but I could see the rings in the otolith which are the indicators of the fish's age. After my first one the next two came super easy! Now that I had gotten all of my otoliths we had to go and weigh each one and put that number in the class spreadsheet. once that was complete the next step would be to put all of our information in a scatter plot. The scatter plot I made shows me that all of the fish we dissected, except for one very small fish, were around the same age when they were caught. I thought this was pretty interesting when looking at how many fish we dissected. I thought the points were going to be spread out everywhere. This was a great experience for me because I had never dissected anything before, I thought it was pretty fun also. In response to Garth, section 201, yes I believe there is a restoration project going on that is helping to fix areas in the Indian river lagoon like sea grass beds.