{"id":490,"date":"2016-02-24T15:45:36","date_gmt":"2016-02-24T15:45:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/victoria14\/?p=490"},"modified":"2016-02-24T15:45:36","modified_gmt":"2016-02-24T15:45:36","slug":"earthworm-innards-at-the-wohl-reach-out-lab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/2016\/02\/24\/earthworm-innards-at-the-wohl-reach-out-lab\/","title":{"rendered":"Earthworm innards at the Wohl Reach Out Lab"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I was asked by fellow Soil Biodiversity Group member (and termite fan) Fez<\/a>\u00a0to help with earthworm dissections at the\u00a0Wohl Reach Out Lab<\/a> where she works. My first thought was panic! Although I know quite a lot about the outsides of earthworms, other than a dissection back in\u00a0school I have done little on internal anatomy. Nevertheless I prepared by watching YouTube videos on earthworm dissections and re-reading the\u00a0Earthworm Synopsis<\/a> by Sims and Gerard.<\/p>\n

The Wohl Reach Out Lab is part of Imperial College and provides a space for educational activities in\u00a0science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) for young people. Undergraduates and postgraduate students have the opportunity to work with young people on\u00a0one-day STEM activities as well as week-long residential and non-residential summer courses. They also support running your own outreach events for school children and manage the\u00a0Reaching Further<\/a>\u00a0programme to link early career researchers (like me!) to schools – more about that in another post!<\/p>\n

The earthworm dissection was not as difficult as I thought and I was able to see most of the organs from the diagrams I found online and in my books. The Reach Out team seemed more confident after watching the dissection and I was able to pass on interesting facts about earthworms.<\/p>\n

\"Victoria<\/a>
Me with my Earthworm dissection<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The earthworm dissection was practice for an event the next day when Sky TV was visiting to film the Reach Out Lab’s\u00a0champion Lord\u00a0Robert Winston meeting with schoolchildren to discuss science and dissect earthworms. I came along to watch the filming and ended up leading the activity, demonstrating dissecting the earthworm and then assisting with questions from the students.<\/p>\n

\"Dissected<\/a>
Dissected earthworm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Being filmed was terrifying but also fun and exciting! The dissection was projected onto a large screen using a visualiser which also had a camera attached for close ups of me making the incision, lifting the organs out and pointing them out.\u00a0The students were also really keen and asked lots of great questions on earthworms. I’m not sure how much of me will be in the final video, and I don’t have Sky TV anyway, but it was a great experience. It was also lovely to get to know other members of the Reach Out Lab and I\u00a0am looking forward to working with them again in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I was asked by fellow Soil Biodiversity Group member (and termite fan) Fez\u00a0to help with earthworm dissections at the\u00a0Wohl Reach Out Lab where she works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1033,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[94586,53,169,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-earthworms","category-events","category-outreach","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1033"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}