Crawdad

Crawdad is a groundbreaking neurophysiology lab guide. Not just a traditional lab manual placed online, it engages students with sight and sound, teaching through video demonstration.

Updated in 2014 with higher-resolution videos and figures, new references, and updated text, the exercises are inexpensive and straightforward and have been refined for over 25 years at Cornell and other institutions. They use invertebrate preparations (primarily crayfish, but also snails and an alga), rather than classical vertebrate preparations (such as frogs, turtles, and rats) to illustrate fundamental processes of all nervous systems. The crayfish neuromuscular junction, for instance, is an excellent model for human central nervous system synapses, while snail neurons illustrate intrinsic firing properties. The use of invertebrates alleviates problems of obtaining animal care protocols. Moreover, crayfish are farmed in aquaculture, reducing the ecological impact of using frogs. In addition to guiding students to an understanding of important concepts, each exercise encourages discovery-based learning through student-designed experiments.

Crawdad contains instructions and videos, questions, suggestions for further exploration, tips for dissection and recording, calculators for equations, and background references that link directly to their journals. The text and figures are also available as PDF files. Adopting instructors also have access to additional material within Crawdad added background information, instructions for lab setup, troubleshooting suggestions, answers to questions, and all figures and videos downloadable for classroom presentations.

NOTE: The Instructor's Package is only available to qualified instructors.