Today my coworkers were having a discussion about the cost of supplies for an event next spring. The supply? RAT BRAINS. Turns out they're like $100 a piece or something ridiculous like that.
We figure it has to do with the difficulty in extraction from the skull. I know from experience (oh camp) that rats have extremely thick skulls. I found this out when we were dissecting rats during camp two summers ago and the group of boys I was helping wanted to check out all the major organs. Rat heart? Small, but easy to find and dissect. Rat brain? Encased in a really thick skull that is surrounded by tons of fibrous body tissue and muscle. It took me a good 30 minutes to extract the brain that I then held in my fingers and photographed.
It was a lot if difficult work to retrieve it. I definitely understand why a scientific company would be charging so much for them.
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