Okay, I know this isn't necessarily related to aquariums, but it IS related to fish...

I'm kind of a functional anatomy nerd, so I decided to do a skeletal preparation of a bony fish. I ended up getting my hands on a 10-inch mackerel from a market and just started on him today. After removing a lot of the soft tissue, I pulled out the gills which I'm going to soak in a 70% ethanol solution and then dry out for preservation.

Has anyone else ever done anything like this? This is my first time working on an entire skeleton, so I could use some advice! Especially with the fin rays...

Oh, here's what he looked like before I started:

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That sounds really cool, post pictures when you're done? please?

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Lead me not to temptation...I can make it there myself just fine, thank you

Maggots will do the trick. So will a lot of other bugs - just don't use anything that's capable of chomping fragile fish bones.

I'm definitely planning on posting pictures!

Peterjay - yup, that did cross my mind. I know a couple of people with flesh-eating beetle colonies they use to clean skeletons, but I wanted to do it mostly myself as a teaching tool to become more familiar with the bone structure. But yeah, when it gets too tough, I'll give it a try.

Edit: Okay, here's my progress for day two.

The state of the fish at the end of day 1/start of day 2:

Close-up of the head (not for the squeamish):


Aaaand here he is two hours later:


Obviously, not nearly such a huge difference here. There was a lot more scraping and tweezing involved today.

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Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.
- Douglas Adams