After I graduated from college, I picked up a part-time job at a local medical research company (it was a mile from my university) because I was still deciding on whether or not I should continue with the major in graduate school and wanted to get a feel for it in practice.
My degree was a specialty in biological sciences, and while I can't reveal any details of where it was located, they had a hand in manipulating mostly dead, feed/bred animals to see what medical benefits could be gained from them.
You needed a strong stomach for this job because of its animal dissections, and the best part was seeing reactions that you never learned about in biology class. Yet it was one simple test procedure I've never forgotten.
I opened up a refrigerator where the body of a large crab was being held in a pool half covered, and upside down to drain its fluids. We had some chemicals that would react with each animal differently, and at the bottom of the refrigerator the crab had attached to it the legs of a tarantula. The crab's body was held in a pool of deeply purple liquid that reacted to the blood of the tarantula, so you couldn't see the bottom of it, but the floor of the refrigerator had a small "lip" (where you open the door) that the chemicals which react with the crab's body would drain into. This color for the crab's liquid in the "lip" part was a clear yellow fluid, and depending on the content of the yellow liquid we could discern the level of reaction of how the cellular makeup of the tarantula's legs reacting with its attachment to the crab's thoracie sterna. The legs are attached by the coxa if you need to see a picture (not scary) look here.
So I take out a needle and I extracted a small amount of the liquid from the crab's body and it came our pure, crystal yellow (as expected). Like I said before, there's the purple pool where the crab's body is (this pool is about 6 inches deep and the color is so thick you can't see the bottom) and the yellow pool in front of it which is only 1/2 an inch thick with the yellow liquid (the liquids are immiscible where the yellow liquid has a consistency like oil and the purple liquid settled on the bottom and was similar to water).
For the test to go correctly, I was supposed to inject the yellow liquid I extracted from the crab's body into the 1/2 an inch pool in front of the deeper pool. Something went wrong. Somehow a reactive contaminant (either from the needle or the crab's abdomen) reacted with the settled purple pool. The deeper pool instantly started to clear and dead bodies of tarantulas were visible everywhere. They were mottled, spotted, and shriveled. They must have been there for months, and there were even parts of legs that hadn't been cleaned out. I remember it only lasted a few seconds, and my brain instantly shut itself down to prevent any further shock. (I only viewed the right side of the pool where the bodies were, but the legs on the left side I only side-glanced at so I didn't see everything.)
I have NO idea why other researchers never bothered to clean out the pool. It might have been there to assist in keeping the pool a deeper purple color. But my first reaction was "I can't do this anymore. I'm out." It may have been a bad experimental practice, but seeing all those shrivelled tarantula bodies when I wasn't expecting it made me enter graduate school as a different major than the one I had obtained my undergraduate degree in.
Submitted September 09, 2015 at 08:38AM by Marie_Klee http://ift.tt/1ETrGOt nosleep
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