Cricket grinding mill

[NikonUser]

Technically the Proventriculus, equivalent to a chicken's gizzard (perhaps I'm showing my age as I suspect several of you have never prepared a freshly-killed chicken for the pot).
In Crickets and Cockroaches and possibly other insects that eat solid food the mouth opens into a crop which opens into the proventriculus.
This is part of the fore gut is derived from an invagination of the external cuticle and as such has the potential to form hard spines.

Imagine a peeled orange with its segments intact but with a hollow center and an opening at the top and at the bottom. In this cricket there are 6 segments. The outer wall is muscular; the inner walls contain a whole array of spines. These spines break up solid particles into finer particles before they are passed into the mid gut.

Top view, BHS 4x DPlan objective, shows the inside of the proventriculus split open and laid flat on a slide; temporary glycerine mount.
2nd image, with SPlan 10x
3rd image, DPlan 20x
bottom ZS stereo of the 20x image
(images look better as large .tiffs)

[Olympusman]

Nice stuff! I think we would all be interested in details about your micro dissection setup.

[Planapo]

Splendid! It's great to see stuff in reality that one has only read about or seen drawings of!

--Betty

[rjlittlefield]

Splendid indeed! I was just starting to wish I could see this in stereo, when suddenly I scrolled down one more notch and there it was!

Working back and forth from the stereo to the higher resolution images, I think I get a really good feel for how this thing is structured. This is a special treat for me because I've never even read about this structure before.

Very, very nice work!

--Rik

[NikonUser]

Thanks everyone for your comments.

I think we would all be interested in details about your micro dissection setup.

Not micro-dissection. I really did not have to think about it, as a practicing entomologist for 60 years (I started young and made a career of it) such dissections are 2nd nature.
Anyway, I just pinned a dead cricket onto a wax-bottomed dish, removed the tergites (dorsal plates) using a pair of fine forceps. Squirted water into the body cavity, teased away the fat body to reveal the gut, removed the proventriculus, sliced it open with a scalpel, soaked in 5% KOH for a couple of hours to soften some of the adhering tissue, rinsed in water, soaked in glycerine, placed on slide, attached cover glass.
The proventriculus is a tough organ, you don't need a delicate touch.

My local pet shops sell various live insects as reptile food, and as I have 4 lizards to feed I keep a good supply of crickets, mealworms, and super worms to keep them happy.