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From blood-sucking leeches to dissected toads, The University of Melbourne’s Tiegs Zoology Museum is an intriguing teaching collection of preserved biological specimens. Meet Rohan Long, Technology Officer at the museum and learn about the diversity of preparations available to students to study the intricacies of animal anatomy.
Animal specimen - 'Annelida hirudinea' (leeches), 2017, Tiegs Zoology Museum, University of Melbourne
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© Digital reproduction copyright of Tiegs Museum
Audio - Interview with Rohan Long (Technical Officer of Zoology, University of Melbourne), Alicia Sometimes (interviewer), 'The Catalogue', 2017, Science Gallery Melbourne
Interview was part of the Blood exhibition for Science Gallery Melbourne, 2017
[Intro Music]
We've got nerves from a rabbit, we've got tadpoles, an eyelid of a pig, the jaw of a kitten, the lacrimal gland from a cat - so yeah, this is the history of the department pretty much, in these tiny little containers.
Preparation of cats... your guess is as good as mine... preparation of cats 'something' to show neuroglia. This is our entire department in its wonderful form. I just love going through these things, it's so much fun. And I would like to get somebody to do a project where they actually catalogue all this stuff.
Oh god, human foetus. That's from, it could be 1898, and the following date is 00 - so that could be 1900, I don't know. But it gets a bit creepy at that stage, when you see that sort of thing - human foetus, on a little slide from 100 years ago. And we could have a look at that under the microscope. It's a bit creepy, but very very interesting.
I remember when I dissected my first cane toad. I'd always been big in zoology but I did not want to cut up a cane toad, but I sort of was forced into it. I was going to try and not show up to class.. and make my lab partner do it. But then my lab partner didn't show up so I was forced to turn up and do the dissection - and it was good.
You learn a lot and you have to get desensitised if you want to do zoology. You've just got to be like, 'I'm gonna do it'. And I have no dissected many many many toads. And I have really desensitised.
I rather like these specimens because there's an actual artistry to it. It's intended as an educational thing, and it is, but there's also an aesthetic to it. Where someone has made, what is essentially, an amazing art piece that happens to be a teaching aid. But it's just amazing to see that sort of craft.
Thyroid gland from a bearded lizard, thymus gland from a wallaby, the mandibula gland, they don't even say what animal that's from. So this is a very large glass jar with a toad inside it, and the toad has been dissected, and sort of suspended in dissection. So it's like a display specimen, and you can see all the insides of the toad, all the veins and vessels and the heart - all the blood related organs are bright red, because they would have actually had a die or a stain put through that system to artificially make them stand out like that. But it's actually a pretty amazing looking specimen, so everything of this toad's insides are outside.
I guess it's one thing to talk about structures and talk about processes, but when you actually open up an animal and look inside and feel the bits and pieces, and see the way that they all connect to each other - it's so illustrative, in a way that just talking about it and reading about it just can't convey. And that, in the heart of it, is what all of this collection is about, it's experiences with things, with specimens that get across ideas without a lot of words or detail - just that experience of seeing it, or holding it or whatever. Because some of this stuff, you have to experience it to understand it, to appreciate it.
[End Music]
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Please acknowledge the item’s source, creator and title (where known)
© Copyright of Tiegs Zoology Museum, University of Melbourne
Interview was part of the Blood exhibition for Science Gallery Melbourne, 2017
Rohan Long, Technical Officer of Zoology at the University of Melbourne is interviewed about the intriguing specimens that inhabit Tiegs Zoology Museum and explains why the museum collects these types of specimens.
Interview was part of the Blood exhibition for Science Gallery Melbourne, 2017. Interviewed and recorded by Alicia Sometimes.
Animal specimen - 'Annelida hirudinea' (leeches), Tiegs Zoology Museum, University of Melbourne
Can you reuse this media without permission? No (with exceptions, see below)
All rights reserved
This media item is licensed under "All rights reserved". You cannot share (i.e. copy, distribute, transmit) or rework (i.e. alter, transform, build upon) this item, or use it for commercial purposes without the permission of the copyright owner. However, an exception can be made if your intended use meets the "fair dealing" criteria. Uses that meet this criteria include research or study; criticism or review; parody or satire; reporting news; enabling a person with a disability to access material; or professional advice by a lawyer, patent attorney, or trademark attorney.
Please acknowledge the item’s source, creator and title (where known)
Teigs Zoology Museum, University of Melbourne
Audio - Interview with Rohan Long (Technical Officer of Zoology, University of Melbourne), Alicia Sometimes (interviewer), 'Bloodsuckers', 2017, Science Gallery Melbourne
Interview was part of the Blood exhibition for Science Gallery Melbourne, 2017
[Intro Music]
Rohan: So we had a very cool, early academic named Georgina Sweet, who was the first possibly, or one of the first female professors at the University. So she was active in the late 19th Century and she was a very very talented lady and very very good at what she did.
And what she did for a lot of the part was parasites, so these may well be some of her specimens. And a lot of them are just parts of things infected with parasites, and that's obviously not a whole rabbit, that's part of the rabbit's tissues that are riddled with Taenia - a tape worm. Tape worms are just parasitic, that's what the whole tape worm looks like, they are parasitic animals. Once again they have that ring of teeth-like structures on their head, they latch onto a tissue, hold on there and just suck for dear life.
So let's have a look at these slides, I'm using a key to open a cabinet, to get another key to open a cabinet.. because that's where I am at the moment.
[Noise of keys and cabinet doors opening]
I'll take out a nice little turtle, he's a big turtle.
[Background noise of cabinet being open and closed]
I ended up finding lots of.. now these are the super old ones, they might be in the other half. Do we have anything interesting here? Possibly.
So these are microscope slides, let's see if I can find.. there's some more of those tape worms. Why don't we see if we can find a bloodsucking insect or something like that.
These guys are our leeches here, they are pretty innocuous looking really, but they've got those wonderful round, sort of, sucking discs - to suck your blood out. Which is kind of interesting, it's very similar to the Lamprey but they're in no way related at all. But if you want to suck blood out of another animal, it obviously helps to have a nice round sucking implement to get that out. No matter what group you're from, that tends to be the solution to that particular problem.
We think of leeches as being bloodsuckers and they mostly are, but there are some leeches that are, there are some free living leeches that just go about their lives and eat snails and that sort of thing.
There is a family of leeches.. I was going to do a post grad project on this, but I didn't, I went with penguins instead. But there's a family of leeches which exhibit parental care, which I think is the coolest thing ever. So the Mum leech, carries the baby leeches around on her back, catches snails, and feeds the baby leeches.. just like a bird would with their kids.
So there was a guy at Monash who was studying these animals because they thought that it would be a great idea to compare leech parental behaviour with, you know, bird parental behaviour or mammal parental behaviour. So I love that idea of caring leeches - you know, the good family life of a leech.
But those guys, those are not the bloodsuckers, they hunt, but they are not parasitic.
Alicia: What do they eat?
Rohan: Mostly snails I think, they'll catch little snails. They live in fresh water lakes and they'll catch a tiny little snail and then hand the snail over to their babies. It's adorable.
Yeah, this is something that I, I pulled these out of the cabinet and sort of got just blown away by how old many of them are. And I guess, you know, the stories that are.. well, there's a hundred different stories in these things.
[Music]
Voiceover: Brought to you by Science Gallery Melbourne. Visit melbourne.sciencegallery.com for more information.
[End Music]
Can you reuse this media without permission? No (with exceptions, see below)
All rights reserved
This media item is licensed under "All rights reserved". You cannot share (i.e. copy, distribute, transmit) or rework (i.e. alter, transform, build upon) this item, or use it for commercial purposes without the permission of the copyright owner. However, an exception can be made if your intended use meets the "fair dealing" criteria. Uses that meet this criteria include research or study; criticism or review; parody or satire; reporting news; enabling a person with a disability to access material; or professional advice by a lawyer, patent attorney, or trademark attorney.
Please acknowledge the item’s source, creator and title (where known)
© Copyright of Tiegs Zoology Museum, University of Melbourne
Interview was part of the Blood exhibition for Science Gallery Melbourne, 2017
Rohan Long,Technical Officer of Zoology at the University of Melbourne is interviewed about parasites and slide specimens at Tiegs Zoology Museum.
Interview was part of the Blood exhibition for Science Gallery Melbourne, 2017. Interviewed and recorded by Alicia Sometimes.
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