Finding frogs strapped to trays on tables, Anatomy & Dissection Club members entered Mr. Eric Scheiber’s room on Friday, Nov. 22. A callback to a common middle school dissection, the dissection provided a clear view of the frog’s organ systems, which was part of the reason that the frog was selected as the model organism for one the first activities for the club.

“This is the first time we’ve done a frog dissection,” Mr. Scheiber said. “This seems very similar to the one that I did when I was in middle school, and everybody seemed to move through this a little quicker. Then we start to get into specimens that we don’t have as much experience with, and the tissue becomes harder to cut. The bigger the specimen gets, the more effort the dissection is going to take.”

Participants began by pinning the frog to the pan, allowing them to make skin and muscle incisions and peel back the flesh of its stomach. This revealed the body cavity, which contained organs such as the lungs, liver, and gallbladder.

“Once you really cut into the muscle, the initial surprise was very nice,” Gabriel Oliveira ‘26 said. “In humans, we have a more robust skeletal system, but with frogs, it was very easy to cut into and see the organs. Seeing all the organs and everything that goes into making a frog work and live was very interesting. I never really sat down and thought [that] frogs also need an intestinal system, they also need a heart, [and] they also need a brain.”

“[My favorite part was] looking at the different organs after it was cut open,” Abbie Yarbrough ‘28 said. “Everything was really juicy.”

The instructions also walked participants through other interactions, such as inserting a probe into the frog’s glottis — a body part connected to the trachea that can be spread open to reveal the vocal cords used for croaking.

“The more complex an organism gets, the more fun it gets,” Anatomy & Dissection Club President Mishree Narasaiah ‘25 said. “There are a couple of fun facts about frogs. [For example, they] were literally the first animals to have vocal cords. What is really interesting about amphibians — especially frogs, because they go through metamorphosis — [is that] they have nostrils but they can also breathe through their skin. It’s just little things like that. You can find something interesting for everything.”

The end of the instructions included how to tell whether the frog was male or female. Many of the female frogs contained egg sacs in their abdominal cavities, which the students excitedly extracted and observed.

“I just want people to have fun and to realize that they can do dissections and sort of have that opportunity,” Anatomy & Dissection Club Secretary Niranjana Prem ‘25 said. “With this one, hopefully they [found] something interesting about the anatomy [of a frog] that maybe they didn’t know before.”