Biology: Dissection Essay, Research Paper

For my project that I’m doing for biology , I’m doing a dissection. I’m going to be performing my project with Trevor Johnson , Tyler McCaskill, and Tom Shudt .The dissection that we decided to do was the dissection of a male and female shark.

We are doing a dissection on a shark because we want to learn about the shark anatomy and the way the sharks organs work to keep all the water out and still eat fish while they are swimming around in the ocean.We also want to know how the sharks skin is so resistant to cancer . We also wanted to know a little bit about the shark , so maybe if we decide to go into the field of Marine Biology we would have a little more knowledge on what the jobs in that field are like .I also thought that it would be interesting to dee a shark up close and in person because we either have to go to the ocean or to an aquarium just to see a shark.

When the word Shark comes to mind most people think of a monster that feeds on humans and is an enemy of all living beings. Contrary to popular belief less than 10 percent of sharks are known to attack humans unprovoked. Sharks are classified under the class of Chondrichthyes, which is fish that have characteristics of a skeleton made of cartilage, jaws, paired fins, and paired nostrils. The superorders are divided into two groups, which are Batoidea that have rays and their relatives and Selachii, which are sharks. Scientists have found isolated spines, teeth, and scales that appeared 350 to 400 million years ago in the Devonian Period known as “Age of Fishes”. Most modern sharks have evolved 100 million years ago when dinosaurs lived on earth. (Matthews, 1989) Sharks have been known to inhabit tropical and temperate seas as well as some cold and polar seas. Migration of sharks is poorly understood due to not all species migrating. And in the species that do migrate the distance may be short or long and is based on availability of the food and environmental cycles. One American biologist Eugenie Clark is the world leader in shark study, she was the first person to learn how sharks behaved in captivity and how well sharks had the ability to understand. Through her studies with lemon sharks she found out that sharks were able to learn essential things but when there was a drastic change in what they were use to sharks were not able to adjust. There is much scientific signifigance to my dissection ofj the great sand shark (dog fish). “In the early 1950’s, Dr. John F. Prudden , discovered the effectivenss of shark cartilage during his work on wound healing and srthritis . In1972, Prudden injected cartilage into a woman who was being treated for ulcerated breast cancer.Her cancer completely regressed.”

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This is one inccident were the shark has been used to cure cancer . It turns out that the sharks skin doesn’t help improve the paitient ; it’s the cartilage of the shark that help the cancer patient and makes the sharks more immune to cancer.Bovine ( cow) cartilage works just like the shark cartilage to run off cancer.

The sharks are the most deadly characters in the world. They only hurt you if you are bleeding. My advice is that if you’re ever diving in the ocean with your scuba gear just don’t cut yourself on a jagged rock.