Crayfish Dissection with Midde Schoolers

I had a very interesting conversation with the lab tech at our school
today. I was doing crayfish dissection with my 13 year olds today. So I
was already using some crayfish that had been in the Biology supply
room since before the beginning of the last school year. Everything on
the inside of the crayfish was brown and the students were having a
hard time figuring out what the different organs were when the lab tech
calls my class.

"I got some crayfish for your class to dissect from the supermarket." he says.

I reply, "That sounds great I will need them in about 30 minutes when my next class comes in."

Then he informed me, "There is a slight problem with them."

"What’s the problem?"

"They were alive when I bought them and I don’t know if they will be
dead that soon. I put them in alcohol to kill them and I think some of
them may be getting drunk. So anyway, they are all still alive."

At this point I didn’t know exactly what to say. Teaching middle
schoolers is always a challenge and some of the girls were getting
themselves pretty worked up about having to dissect a dead crayfish, I
really didn’t know what would happen if they had to start cutting into
a crayfish that was still alive.

"Well, I think we will have to hope that they die quickly." I said, "I’ll be up to get them when my class is over."

So the good news is that enough of them HAD died in the alcohol by the
time my next class started that we didn’t have to deal with cutting
into live crayfish on my students first dissection lab (come to think
of it if they were still alive it would have been vivisection).

But anyways, if they WERE getting drunk it probably wasn’t the worst way to die.