E! True Hollywood Story: Planarians

Above:  The cruel price of fame for a young, famous and fast-living Planarian.  Trading in microscope lights for camera flashbulbs, constant scrutiny and pressures to be a role model mixed with the high highs of success make for a bumpy ride for the celebrity.  Not actually sure why I drew this but it's somehow better than finding a license-free pic of a flatworm.

Phylum = Platyhelminthes (phylogeny)
Layered tissues x3 (triploblasty) - endoderm, mesoderm, endoderm
Acoelomate - no body cavity
Nuclei abound - syncytial tegument
Anatomy of digestion = mouth/pharynx/gastrovascular cavity
Representative genus = Dugesia
Intestinal cavity w/ diverticula
Aquatic, free-living carnivores
Not to be confused with segmented flatworms (e.g. tapeworms)
Sense w/ auricles and eyespots

In the freshman biology lab I teach, I stress the importance of organization and study skills as much as I push the course material to my students.  The reason being that 100-level courses (at least in my experience) can actually be the most difficult to prepare for, given the enormous range of information they often cover.  I was toying around with different ways to present information and put myself to the challenge of creating a mnemonic.  In the first week of lab, we covered a few protists as well as cnidarians and flatworms.  Planarians (a common name for organisms found in Class Turbellaria of the flatworm Phylum Paltyhelminthes) were the most reasonable to work with, but I obviously had to take some liberties with wording.

Playing off the letters P-L-A-N-A-R-I-A-N-S, I managed to squeeze into an impractically complicated device most of the distinctive features that the students are expected to know about the Turbellarians (and, often, Platyhelminthes in general).  Certainly not all, and it doesn't begin to help with drawings, microscope slides, etc.  For the record, the same exercise feels doable with CNIDARIANS but it'd take a more experienced scientist than me to solve the PLATYHELMINTHES puzzle. 

I might use this space to check in with my teaching assignment semi-regularly this semester.  It's a handy opportunity for me to review, plus I think it's an interesting way for non-science majors to see what they're missing (in a relatively enjoyable way) and for biologists like me to look back and see a snippet of the incredible amount of information we learned in the average week/lab/semester, even very early in our undergraduate careers.  It's definitely easier to appreciate in retrospect and from the point-of-view of exam-writer instead of exam-taker.