Pig Dissection

The purpose of the unit essential question, which asks how different cells, tissues, organs, and organ systems work together or independently to maintain homeostasis, is reflected by the dissection of the pig we had done. In the process of doing it, we found many similar body parts that you might find in a human, such as key parts and organs of the endocrine, respiratory, circulatory, and digestive system. This is very relevant to studies of human anatomy, which has greatly helped our studies in biology and our lives in general. This relates to our studies in this unit, since we went with molecular biology again, and now, our understanding of different parts of animal bodies, including pigs, can be used to determine parts of the fetal pig, so we could dissect it with a larger background to relate to. My favorite part of this dissection has got to be cutting the thing open. For some reason, it was very pleasurable to just cut through the skin, perfectly exposing the bodily contents under. This might be strange to some people, but I feel that I was actually not bad with the cutting of the pig, and I managed to leave all the parts of the pig unscarred, while later finding rare parts of the pig, such as the two parathyroid glands. I think that the dissection was a valuable experience, because it allowed us to go hands on with the stuff we are learning. It's one thing to hear about it on a vodcast or in a middle of a lecture, and it's another thing to see it in front of your very own eyes. This also taught me that I probably won't be going into the medical field in the future. Although I understood the content that was taught, it was basic, and actually applying it was different. Besides, I was quite grossed out by the different parts of the pig that we had to dissect, which made me wonder how the people from the anatomy survived the cat dissection! Below is the video of our dissection, while explaining the parts of the pig that we studied, one by one. Do be wary, the quality of the footage is poor, but it was a long clip, so it took a long time to upload.