senoritafish | Yecch...

This is the part of my job that's not so pleasant. Processing fish samples is not so bad if the boat that caught them has decent refrigeration and the fish are fairly fresh. However, we've gotten two sardine samples lately from a particular boat, and the combination of warm water temps, and poor refrigeration on the boat makes for really nasty, smelly samples. Usually they don't look this bad unless they've been frozen and thawed a couple of times. I am grateful for rubber gloves.

We also had very large mackerel come in today, some nearly weighing nearly a kilo. We're kind of glad to see them, because we haven't gotten many mackerel samples all this year - we have twelve samples scheduled each month, and we've only managed to get sixteen samples since January. However, clean-up after processing big fish is not so fun. Not only do they often have internal parasites that like to crawl around your cutting board while you're cleaning off the otoliths, but we have to grind them up when we're finished. The wetlab has an industrial sized sink disposal, and normally we can just drop whole single fish into it. These were so big I had to cut them into 4-inch size pieces to be fed one at a time, down the sink - a damned messy, bloody job. The disposal goes wild after each piece, and may tend to throw globs of water and fish flesh back at you, unless you manage to duck out of the way. We wear lab coats - maybe we should start wearing goggles. Blech.