Fables The Fox and he Goat
16 years ago
During the first trimester, one thing we did was dissect owl pellets. An owl pellet is a mass of undigested remains of a meal that is coughed up by an owl after consuming its prey. An owl regurgitates,food that is already swallowed is ejected from the mouth, because an owl does not have teeth. This means that since the owl can not chew the prey it swallows it whole. Then the prey enters into the digestive tract. This part of the stomach has enzymes and acids to aid in digestion. Next,the food travels to the second part of the stomach, the gizzard. The gizzard is a muscular organ that grinds the food and ”filters” indigestible parts from traveling into the intestines. The pellet is formed from the hair, bones or feathers that are left in the gizzard. The pellet will take several hours to form and several more before it is regurgitated. The owl cannot eat again until this pellet is expelled.
This article is about a scientist, Jay Neitz, and his team at the University of Washington. They led a research to help give monkeys a more colorful life. These Squirrel monkeys, Sam and Dalton, lack the proteins that enable them to see red and green. They gave one of the monkeys a helpful virus to give them the proteins they need to see these colors, while the other ate the same food like usual. To test their experiment, after 20 weeks they showed the monkey a grid of colored and grey dots. For an award of getting the correct color they got grape juice. Before the gene therapy they could easily see yellow and blue dots, and now Sam and Dalton can pick out the colors, red and green