06-29-2017, 03:21 AM
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#59 (permalink)
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| Snidget
Join Date: Mar 2014
Posts: 2,710
Hogwarts RPG Name:
Devin James Horton
Seventh Year
Hogwarts RPG Name:
Deanna Joyce Horton
Gryffindor Second Year  x1
|  Teapot Occamy| gryphons&giraffes&goats,OH MY | chaser of the truth | flutiful❧
Ooooh, so the lungs were the same material. Thinner and in a different shape, but the same material. Interesting. Honking daffodils did not have lungs, so there must be some other way that they produced sound. Wasn’t that amazing? Herbology was so cool! Mandrakes actually had lungs! Isa jotted down a few notes regarding what Professor Myers had just told her about mandrake lungs and honking daffodils.
They were going to be cutting into the necks to look at the larynx! What was that that Professor Myers said about an esophagus? ”Mandrakes have an esophagus?” Like, wasn’t the esophagus part of the digestive tract? Did mandrakes even have a digestive tract? Because the “windpipe” of the respiratory system in humans was the trachea. Okay, well, they were cutting into the throats and that was the important thing to know. Professor Myers mentioned what he had told Isa! She smiled when he mentioned it again and wrote plants are not animals on her paper. It was good to know that plants were not animals, because if plants were animals she would have to seriously reconsider her vegetarian diet. Actually, she probably couldn’t be a vegetarian if plants were animals given that vegetarianism was basically not eating animals. But then, if plants were animals, what would she eat? This hypothetical situation was getting complicated. It was such a relief that she did not have to worry about this.
Moving on to the next part of the dissection. Isa listened intently to the instructions for the next step. Incision on the neck. Seemed complicated, but having the diagram was useful. Picking up her scalpel, she made one small vertical incision on the “neck” of the mandrake. Then she made a diagonal cut up and a diagonal cut down from the middle of the vertical incision on the right side and repeated that on the left of the vertical incision. Peeling back the flaps, she could see the larynx. She did it, she could see the larynx! Mandrakes had a larynx! This was amazing! Herbology was awesome! Ahhh, so exciting! Isa kept the excitement to herself, trying to act in a manner that was appropriate for a lab that involved the use of sharp and potentially dangerous tools. The excitement was definitely there though. Isa had learned how to express her excitement in ways that did not involve screaming and flailing arms.
Setting down her scalpel, Isa poked the mouth open on her mandrake. They had tongues and noses? Wow. It looked a lot like a human respiratory system. Mandrakes didn’t breathe? Then what were the lungs for? How did they get air in their lungs? ”Does something happen with the lungs when the mandrakes are out of a pot and exposed to air? Because they scream when they’re taken out of a pot? Maybe air flows into the nose or something?” Something to do with the mandrakes being out of a pot, maybe? The idea of mandrakes having lungs but not breathing was confusing. She needed to think more about this. The gears were turning in Isa’s head. ”Why do the structures in a mandrake resemble the human respiratory system? Just to produce sound?” Obviously it wasn’t the same and was made of plant material, but there were similarities. Maybe the structure had something to do with how it worked. Were there other ways of living things producing sound that didn’t involve lungs?
Oh no. Derf was upset. Friend having a meltdown alert. Isa didn’t want to overwhelm Derf with too many people around him and she knew he couldn’t hear anything with those earmuffs, so instead Isa wrote a note on a spare piece of parchment and brought it over to Derf. Isa hugged Derf and handed him the note. Maybe it would help him calm down. Hopefully he would actually read it, because she couldn't effectively communicate with him by talking to him while he still had those earmuffs on.
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