My day at the Museum usually starts by preparing food for our raptors. The process is a little gory because we must remove the guts of each mouse, rat, and quail we feed to our education birds. When I pick up a particularly large mouse, I often try to guess: is its belly filled with fat? or under-developed babies?
With one particularly wide mouse this week, I could tell right away what was inside. The skin underneath the fur looked pinkish-white and as I began my dissection I found a solid wall of pure white fat under the skin. I figure that all of that fat probably isn't good for the raptors to eat, just like humans' high-fat diets can lead to health problems. So I carved out the walls of fat from the belly and the globs wrapped around the kidneys for a slightly healthier meal. (If you're not squeamish, you can see a photo of the fat I found in the mouse dissection here.)
(Ready for a slightly-related fun fact I recently learned? You have the same number of fat cells in your body right now as you did when you were a teenager! Once we reach adulthood, we keep the same number of fat cells throughout our life. Gaining or losing weight is a matter of fat cells growing or shrinking, not multiplying or disappearing.
One more fact that blew my mind: this fat cell research in 2008 was made possible by the nuclear weapon testing in the 1950's and '60's. I won't get into that here, but I highly recommend watching "Connected" on Netflix to discover how seemingly unrelated things like this are connected.)
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