2012+Daily+Updates

May 09, 2012 We got our pigs today. Althought the two pigs are both females, they are considerably different in size. The size of the pig is supposed to imply it's age. Does this mean that when a sow has a litter that the runt is actually younger than the rest of the piglets, or is it just smaller and still the same age?

 Because we are not naming the pigs, we will probably refer to them as "Little" and "Big" in the future. (Even though this is kind of a form of naming, it doesn't really count.)

Today we measured our pigs to approximate their ages, determined their sexes, and checked out their ears, eyes, and mouths. May 14, 2012  So today we finished skinning our pigs and looked at their muscles. Each muscle has small parallel lines (called **striations**) running on it and you can see the transition from one muscle to another by the direction of the lines. The part of the muscle that is attached to the part of the skeleton that moves is called the **insertion**. The other end, attached to the less rigid part of the skeleton is called the **origin**. There are three types of muscles:  **Cardiac** - Cardiac muscle is involuntary muscle around the heart. **Striated** - (although cardiac muscles are also striated, in this case the term "striated muscles" is used to refer exclusively to skeletal muscles) These muscles are voluntary muscles that are usually connected to the skeleton by tendons  **Smooth** - Smooth muscles are involuntary muscles that are not striated. They can be found all throughout the body. They are in the walls of veins, arteries and blood vessels, many parts of the digestive system, both male and female reproductive tracts, the urinary bladder, and the respiratory tract. We all will have to learn and remember the names, locations, and jobs of four muscles for our quiz tomorrow!! We then removed parts of their ribs so we could look at their hearts and lungs. Their hearts were very different in size with the larger pig having a much larger and more developed heart than the smaller pig. We also identified their lungs which were on either side of the heart. The heart was medial in the chest. After looking at the heart and lungs, we examined the parts of the digestive system. The lifer is quite large and made up of three lobes: a large central lobe and a smaller one on either side of it. Inbetween the lobes of the liver, was the very small gall bladder. Under the small right lobe was the long tounge shaped spleen. The large and small intestines were posterior to the liver and identifiable by their diameters and locations(the small intestine is narrower and on the left). By lifting (or removing) all three lobes of the liver we could veiw the stomach. 