This will be our first invertebrate lab. We will be studying the control of the neurogenic heart of crustaceans using the lobster as a model.

Work quickly! You will have 30 min (and very lucky if you have an hour) once you open the carapace. Keep your animal chilled (they are Maine lobsters!) and irrigated with cold Lobster ringers at all times.

Please check out the powerpoint notes and the review paper on the crustacean cardiac ganglion by our very own Dr. Ian Cooke who was an emeritus faculty from the Zoology Department and PBRC, a pioneer in invertebrate neurophysiology!

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Lobster Heart Lab Manual

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The assignment for this week is a full group lab report. Please take what you have learned from the individual worksheet assignments and apply this to these reports. We will go over what our expectations will be for these reports in lab.

First live animal experiment, this one will be really cool.

Please look over the dissection guide in addition to the lab manual below. You must wear closed-toed shoes to participate.

This will be an individual worksheet assignment. Remember you may work together with your group members to generate figures, but the written portions must be your own.

Lab Manual

Dissection Guide

Toad Heart Worksheet

Heart-Anatomy

Please do the prelab in your notebook and do the prelab quiz on Laulima before class. This is an Individual Worksheet (IWS) lab, due next week.

This is a fun lab, where you will be able to collect an ECG on yourself — a print out of the electrical signals of your heart!

This week we will be looking at ECGs to further our understanding of the Cardiac Cycle. Think about how the heart works, breaking down what is happening at each component of the cycle. Please note the different types of parameters that are informative – pressure, electrical activity, volume, heart sounds, etc. and what they tell us.

Have fun and think about what kinds of hypotheses you can come up with to explain how your heart responds to exercise. Make sure you focus on physiological mechanisms (be specific!) and function. WHY are these things occurring?

Please watch this podcast and read through the lab manual posted below in preparation for lab this week:

Electrocardiogram Lab Manual

ECG Protocol

ECG Worksheet

In addition, we are providing some tables to help you with data collection this week:

ECG Data Table

We may be using the Vernier system. If so you can download the Vernier Graphical Analysis software to collect/visualize your data