Pictured above are the NINE rats from Miller Park Zoo. One male and eight females!
This past week was full of exotic experiences. Let’s start with Ivana. Ivana is currently doing a prospective research study on rats. Summary: she wants to see if there’s a less invasive, but still accurate method to record body temperature in rats.She did the same research project last year in guinea pigs (Huge success, what fun!) and hopefully the manuscript will be published soon. Anyhoo, she needs rats to participate in her study and Miller Park Zoo has nine (count em’) NINE rats.So that was a fun morning with Eliana doing physical exams and taking temperatures. But the real fun happened when the exams and temperature taking was over. Eliana and Ivana had the opportunity to participate in flamingo exams, cow venipuncture, skink swabbing, baby tamandua exams/feeding, baby pallas cat vaccines, and so much more. It was a great day, shout out to Dr. Sander and Dr. Webb for letting us participate! No pictures of the zoo animals besides the rats will be posted.
Bryce counting his thousands of blood cells with his new bff, the microscope
Bryce has been counting blood cells. Literally THOUSANDS of blood cells. Below is a picture of Bryce sitting in front of microscope counting his blood cells on a hemocytometer. He has successfully started his actual study on thrombocyte/leukocyte rich plasma in bearded dragons and is collecting his data. We love data! (almost as much as we love bearded dragons).
Finally, what else is going on with our bearded dragons? It’s not super exciting, but we switched out their basking buckets (which used to be plastic Tupperware containers) with rocks. Don’t worry, we made sure to scrub, bleach, and scrub the rocks again to make sure nothing weird entered our beardies cages. Just to be safe! It’s more natural and the beardies seem to love them. Look at the pictures for a before and after!
AFTER
BEFORE
