terrified, screaming tiny girl (you) being pulled out of her tiny sealed enclosure for the first time, so horribly scared, thinking she's been kidnapped, being carelessly dumped out, falling head over heels onto a table. Hearing loud voices above you offering stern instructions to pin you, whirling around to try and find out what's even going on just to be grasped by a pair of huge, fumbling fingers, pushing down on you with far too much force at first, pinning you down. (Please note, this entire time you are screaming really good and hot.) Clumsilly grasping at your body with horrifying, brutish strength and tying you down, spreading your limbs out wide, forcing you into a spread-out pose. Finally letting you look up now that you're properly bound, and you have to squint and cry against the blinding light, too much after the tiny cardboard box you'd been sealed in for days. You can hear all different conversation, people exclaiming about something 'gross', and as the tears clear from your eyes, you can make out the shape of an ordinary ceiling, bearing pale fluorescent lights, faces looming above. It takes you a minute to process that the strange torture chamber you've been brought to is actually a classroom. There's more tinies, one on each table, being stared at or tied up by students who exclaim that they're gross and nasty, while the teacher directs them on how to use zipties to stick them down, handing out a fresh tiny to the handful of tables that accidentally crush some vital organ. Your chest rising and falling hard as you try to process what's going on, watching as the teacher walks off with one of the injured shrinkies, wondering what she's doing until you see her dump the injured, still screaming things into a trash can, wiping her hands after and throwing the bloodied tissue in after them. The walls are covered in diagrams and charts, some depicting the anatomy of a single cell, pointing out different elements, some depicting the human body, different organs. The girl high above you pokes your ribs with a huge finger, giggling at your reaction and looking grossed out by you, heedless of your cries for help or just to be told what's going on, to please be let go. The teacher, distantly, takes their seat at the head of the classroom, and begins to instruct the students on the object of the lesson. At the edge of your vison, the worksheet is visible, bearing black and white clipart of tinies cut and splayed open.
METHOD - STUDENT ACTIVITY
Place the preserved tiny on the dissecting tray with the dorsal surface facing up.
Observe the tiny appendages that have evolved to adapt to terrestrial life. The tiny uses 2 limbs to travel and move, making it a biped. You will see that each forelimb includes an upper arm, forearm, and hand. The tiny’s hind limbs are divided into a thigh, lower leg, and foot.
Looking at the head, identify the mouth on the face and the 2 external nares at the nose’s tip. These function as a means of respiration.
Find the round tympanic membranes that form the tiny’s external sound receptors. You will find these to the sides of the eyes.
Look closely at the eyes and attempt to identify each section; the front visible part of the eye is made up of the whitish sclera, a coloured iris, and the pupil. A thin layer called the conjunctiva sits on top of this.
Identify the genitalia, located at the specimen’s posterior end. The microscopic opening provides the function of exit for all urinary and reproductive systems.
Reposition the tiny to lie on its dorsal side.
Carefully cut the jaw joints on each side of the mouth to enable you to open the mouth wide.
Locate the glottis (leads to the lungs) and oesophagus opening (leads to the stomach). See Figure 1.
Conduct a dental analysis. You will find 2 sets of teeth. Firstly, locate the maxillary teeth lining the upper jaw. Secondly, locate the two prominent mandibular teeth located in the bottom jaw
At the back of the roof of the tiny's mouth, you should see 2 openings; the eustachian tubes that lead to the tympanic membranes you identified earlier. The function of these tubes is to aid in pressure equalisation.
Place the tiny on the dissecting tray, ventral surface facing up.
Using scissors, cut into the tiny’s abdomen. To do this, pinch the skin at the tiny’s stomach and make a small cut at the centre.
Slice through the skin, keeping your cuts as straight and clean as possible. Follow the cutting pattern in Figure 2.
Using the same pattern, Slice through the layers of muscle until you reveal the internal organs beneath.
Locate the tiny’s liver in the abdomen body cavity; the liver is a dark reddish brown, wedge-shaped organ with two lobes of unequal size and shape.
Reposition the liver lobes to reveal gallbladder beneath. The gallbladder, which stores bile, will appear significantly smaller and greenish.
Following your dissection guide and Figure 3, identify the following internal structures:
They don't listen to your screams.
Sometimes I get these asks that are really really really really good. Like, almost too good. I just keep looking over them and giggling and kicking my feet because they're so detailed and full of life and big scary ideas <3
But also, the have that they're so long and detailed makes it a much more intimidating task to answer them, you know? Because I want to include at least that same amount of text and nice prose to match, and then I get in my head, and feel like I'm trying to force it, because I don't want to be disrespectful with an answer that's too short!! It's kind of a rock and a hard place hehe.
But I've been given the go ahead to just send this out with something small! And I really want my followers to see this big scary idea. So without further ado:
This is SO hot and so scary <3 I felt my stomach drop three times over reading through this, stunlocked irl as I imagined a bunch of heavy hands pushing and pinning me, fascinated eyes of biology students staring down at me, ignoring all my pleas and struggles, because live dissections of tiny people is just something to be expected in a course like this, it was even in the syllabus at the beginning of the semester. Everyone knew it was coming except for me and the other tiny people 💜 watching in terror as more of us get sliced open, analyzed, hearing the professor explaining everything about our inner workings with a cold, distant objectivity... Just being glad I'm not the girl next to me, who's being "accidentally" mutilated with far, far less precision <3
