You can see a small artery and interlobular duct surrounded by acini in the first 3 images, the acini are part of the "exocrine pancreas" and the cells are arranged in rings and stuffed with red granules that contain digestive enzymes and other products. You can see the granules clearly in the fluorescence shot. Note the oval red blood cells in the duct and artery, with nuclei, birds have nucleated red cells...
The last 2 images show a pancreatic islet, part of the endocrine pancreas. It's surrounded by the more numerous acini. The islet cells secrete insulin and other hormones. They stain much more faintly (with the standard hematoxylin and eosin stain combination) than the surrounding acinar cells.
The tissue came from a mallard taken (not by me, but I was close by...) in eastern Oregon. Samples were removed and fixed in buffered formalin (I am almost certainly the only duck hunter in the Northwest carrying around bottles of formalin) almost immediately post-mortem, then (much later) dehydrated in Cellosolve and ethanol, embedded in polyester wax, sectioned at 5 microns, and stained with Ehrlich's hematoxylin (stains nuclei blue) and Eosin Y/Phloxine B (stains cytoplasm, granules etc. shades of red). All photos taken using a 40X/1.3 NA NPL Fluotar or 60X/1.4 NA PlanApo objective, with a Vario-orthomat eyepiece and 0.32X lens relaying the image to a D300. The fluorescence images were made using broadband blue (420 to 470 nm) illumination to excite the eosin and phloxine, the imaging wavelengths were all > 520 nm. No special processing was applied to deconvolve the fluorescence images, but all were slightly histogram adjusted using imageJ.
Enjoy the duck, I will post more once I get the rest of it sectioned.
David
