#lymnaea

Stor Mosesnegl (Lymnaea stagnalis)

Lymnaea: Taxonomy, Ecology, and Identification Lymnaea, is a genus of air-breathing freshwater snails known for their ecological importance in freshwater habitats worldwide. These pond snails play a critical role in aquatic food webs, serve as bioindicators of water quality, and are of considerable medical and veterinary significance as intermediate hosts for parasitic flukes. Species display…

Great Pond Snail (Lymnaea stagnalis) 

Hello everybody! 

We arrived in Kananaskis this morning, and we've already done so much!

We got on the bus at 9AM sharp, arriving at our destination in an hour. After, we got an introduction to the field station, including some tips on how to deal with a bear encounter - yikes!  We had a bit of time before lunch, so we headed out to find a geocache located on site. This was a multi-cache taking the form of a stroll through WWII history. We found the first cache in the series, and learned that we were actually on the site of a WWII internment camp. More to come over the next days as we learn more about the historical significance of our surroundings. On our way back, we came across a fairly massive anthill, which was an impressive and slightly disconcerting sight. After lunch, we headed down to the lab and performed our first set of injections on our snails. It took a bit of practice to master the technique, as it's important to be confident and not at all hesitant with the needle. We also practiced isolating the Lymnaea CNS - a skill we'll need for our future assays.  The rest of the evening was fairly relaxing, and involved a delicious dinner (including ice cream), soccer and volleyball. The night was concluded with über-competitive rounds of Bananagram and Taboo (sidenote: Taboo was played in the form of battle of the sexes - girls won by 2 points :P )

Here are some photos to recap our day: 

Hello everyone!

We (Yas & Amy) are currently doing a neuroscience field course as part of our program. We spent the last week at the university attending lectures and becoming familiar with the lab techniques, because this week we get to go to Kananaskis for 10 days to work on our very own original research projects! 

We use snails (Lymnaea stagnalis) as our model system. In the past week, we've tested their rasping response, used video-tracking to assess their locomotion, performed electrophysiology on them and performed a backfill stain on the neurons. Here are some pictures - hope you enjoy!

This is the setup used for extracellular recordings; the CNS is pinned down on the plate, electrodes are attached and the whole setup is places in a (grounded) Faraday cage. We're recording from one of the lip nerves emerging from the buccal ganglia. The purpose was to assess the response to sucrose. Essentially, would there be a greater degree of electrical activity once sugar was added to the medium? 

Here is a snapshot of what we were recording. This is a "burst" in electrical activity. Later, we analyzed this data to find patterns in particular types of activity representing the acting of certain neurons:

Here is another picture of the overall setup: 

We used a nickel-lysine dye to perform a backfill staining. The dye is carried back up to the ganglion. If we were doing an experiment on nerve regeneration, we would use this technique to assess the integrity of the damaged neuron; the less dye in the ganglion, the more damaged the neuron is. In this image you're looking at the two buccal ganglia. What's really cool and impressive about this photo is the connection between the ganglia. If you look closely, you can see that the dye has carried over to a tract connection the ganglia, and as a result of backfill staining on the left, we now have some traces of blue in the right ganglion!

More to come when we travel to the field station!